Thomas

the label size is not passed to metapost but is controlled with tex macros like \thlargesize.

On re-reading I think I misinterpreted Martin Budaj's comment (You can test even for user-defined attributes.) I was puzzled because there seemed to be no size or scale variable passed. I thought maybe it was a global. Thanks for the label code suggestion. I may well try it out because it is an improvement on my current solution. Is one point the smallest that can be passed to the likes of \def\thsmallsize{\size[1]} ? If we could pass 0.001 then the code is no more elegant, but multiline text would be caught. The solution I have been using for a year or so is code metapost fonts_setup(0.01,0.01,9,12,16); % xs s m l xl fonts in points and this works perfectly, in that the xs text is invisible. Trouble is in a file with lots of labels the pdf file size is a lot larger than it needs to be, and text searches in the pdf bring up text that is not visible. The obvious solution is to allow the use of zero values in fonts_setup(). As written at present it crashes, and I'm still too bumbly to be able to modify it. Thanks Bruce