[Ipe-discuss] label dimensions

[Rainer Typke]

 > Excuse me for asking: Are you designing an ipelet or are you using 
the ipe
 > xml format just as an figure-file format from another application? If the
 >former I would believe you have to run latex alone for each label and then
 >measure it. If the latter I personally thing you should turn to another
 >file-format than ipe.
 >Use "metapost" which is not only a description of a figure, but a
 >programming language itself (and uses latex/pdflatex fore typesetting).
 >Using metapost you can easily meause the label sizes after they are
 >created. Also, metapost exports high quality eps/pdf just like ipe but
 >with a text editor as gui.

I am going to use Ipe to turn an XML file into a PDF file.  The XML file 
would be generated by my program and contain lines, dots, and textual 
labels. Would metapost be convenient for such a thing? I like the fact 
that my program's output will still be easily editable with Ipe - I 
guess that would not be the case with metapost?
When running Ipe, I notice that some files with potentially interesting 
information appear in the Ipe latexrun directory.

For one of my labels, for example, I notice

/IpeId /08090eb8 /IpeStretch [ 1 1 ] /IpeDepth 0
/BBox [0 0 8.302 6.531]

Can I just assume that the values in the "/BBox" are the dimensions of 
this label?
If this is the case, all I need to do is make sure that no other Ipe run 
overwrites these files before my program can read and parse them, maybe 
by running Ipe with a unique latexrun directory for each call to my 
program. Or is this maybe not even necessary?

Thanks for your help!

Rainer