MetaPost
Paradigm | imperative, typesetting |
---|---|
Designed by | John D. Hobby |
Developer | Taco Hoekwater |
First appeared | 1994 |
Stable release |
1.212
/ 19 October 2010 |
Preview release |
1.750
/ 27 April 2011 |
Typing discipline | duck, dynamic, strong |
OS | Cross-platform |
License | LGPL |
Website |
foundry |
Influenced by | |
Metafont |
MetaPost refers to both a programming language and the interpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived from Donald Knuth's Metafont language and interpreter. MetaPost produces diagrams in the PostScript programming language from a geometric/algebraic description. The language shares Metafont's declarative syntax for manipulating lines, curves, points and geometric transformations. However,
- Metafont is set up to produce fonts, in the form of image files (in .gf format) with associated font metric files (in .tfm format), whereas MetaPost produces encapsulated PostScript files
- The output of Metafont consists of the fonts at a fixed resolution in a raster-based format, whereas MetaPost's output is vector-based postscript graphics (lines, Bézier curves)
- Metafont output is monochrome, whereas MetaPost uses RGB colors.
- The MetaPost language can include text labels on the diagrams, either strings from a specified font, or anything else that can be typeset with TeX.
Many of the limitations of MetaPost derive from features of Metafont. For instance, numbers have a low-precision fixed-point representation, sufficient for representing the coordinates of points in a glyph, but this can be restrictive when working with figures in a larger coordinate space. Moreover, MetaPost does not support all features of PostScript. Most notably, paths can have only one segment (so that regions are simply connected), and regions can be filled only with uniform colours. PostScript level 1 supports tiled patterns and PostScript 3 supports Gouraud shading. To this end, the Asymptote graphics language has been developed to address these shortcomings.
Availability and usage
MetaPost is distributed with many distributions of the TeX and Metafont framework. In particular, it is included in the teTeX and the TeX Live distribution, common on Linux and Unix (including Mac OS X) platforms.
The encapsulated postscript produced by Metapost can be included in TeX, ConTeXt, and LaTeX documents via standard eps-inclusion commands. This output can also be included in the PDFTeX dialect of TeX, thus directly giving PDF output from TeX. This ability is implemented in ConTeXt and in the LaTeX graphics package, and can be used from plain TeX via the supp-pdf.tex macro file. ConTeXt even supports the creation of MetaPost files from within the TeX file.
Examples
This is a single file example.mp which when processed by the MetaPost interpreter (via the command mpost on Linux) produces three eps files example.1, example.2, example.3. These are pictured on the right.
transform pagecoords;
pagecoords:=identity scaled 10mm shifted (100mm,150mm);
beginfig (1)
fill ((0,0)--(2,0)--(2,1)--(1,1)--(1,2)--(0,2)--cycle)
transformed pagecoords withcolor green;
draw ((2,0)..(2,1)..(1,1)..(1,2)..(0,2))
transformed pagecoords;
drawarrow ((0,0)--(2,2)) transformed pagecoords;
endfig;
beginfig (2)
draw (for i=0 upto 7: dir (135i)-- endfor cycle)
transformed pagecoords;
endfig;
pagecoords:=identity scaled 15mm shifted (100mm,150mm);
beginfig (3);
% declare paths to be used
path p[],p[]t;
% set up points by defining relationships
z1=(0,0); z2=z1+2up;
z3=z1+whatever*dir (60)=z2+whatever*dir (-50);
z4=z3+(-1.5,-.5);
z5=z1+dir (135);
z0=whatever[z1,z2]=whatever[z3,z4];
% set up paths
p0=fullcircle yscaled .5 rotated 45 shifted z0 ;
p1=z2---z4..z0..z3---z1;
p2=p1 cutbefore p0 cutafter p0;
p3=p0 cutbefore p1 cutafter p1;
p4=p2---p3---cycle;
% define transformed versions of paths and points
for i=0 upto 4: p[i]t=p[i] transformed pagecoords; endfor
for i=0 upto 5: z[i]t=z[i] transformed pagecoords; endfor
% do some drawing
fill p4t withcolor (1,1,0.2);
draw z1t---z2t withcolor .5white;
draw z3t---z4t withcolor .5white;
pickup pencircle;
draw p0t dashed withdots scaled .3;
draw p1t dashed evenly;
draw p2t withcolor blue;
draw p3t withcolor red;
label.lrt (btex $z_0$ etex, z0t);
label.llft (btex $z_1$ etex, z1t);
label.top (btex $z_2$ etex, z2t);
label.rt (btex $z_3$ etex, z3t);
label.llft (btex $z_4$ etex, z4t);
for i=0 upto 4:
drawdot z[i]t withpen pencircle scaled 2;
endfor
endfig;
bye
The resulting three eps files can be used in TeX via LaTeX's \includegraphics command, ConTeXt's \externalfigure, Plain TeX's \epsfbox command, or (in Plain pdftex) the \convertMPtoPDF command from supp-pdf.tex. To view or print the third diagram, this inclusion is necessary, as the TeX fonts (Computer Modern) are not included in the eps files produced by MetaPost.
See also
References
- Hagen, Hans. "MetaFun" (modules for Metapost).
- Knuth, Donald (1986). The METAFONTbook. Computers and Typesetting. C. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-13444-6.
- "Comprehensive TEX Archive Network" (CTAN). Repository of the TEX source and hundreds of add-ons and style files.
- "(La)TeX Navigator provides 305 simple MetaPost examples".
- Hoekwater, Taco (2006). "MetaPost developments—autumn 2006" (PDF). TUGboat. 27 (1).
External links
- The TeX users group (TUG) http://www.tug.org/ has a page devoted to MetaPost: http://www.tug.org/metapost.html
- Active development of MetaPost continues at http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/metapost/
- Functional MetaPost allows MetaPost to be used from the functional programming language Haskell
- John D. Hobby has a homepage at http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/index.shtml and some other pages and publications devoted to MetaPost, though these are now a little dated
- Historic MetaPost homepage: http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/MetaPost.shtml
- A User's Manual for MetaPost John D. Hobby. Available as a file mpman.ps distributed with MetaPost, or from the Bell Labs web site. Also available in PDF format from CTAN.
- Troy Henderson's Online MetaPost Previewer