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| Paradigm | imperative,typesetting |
|---|---|
| Designed by | John D. Hobby |
| Developer | Taco Hoekwater, Luigi Scarso |
| First appeared | 1994 (1994) |
| Stable release | 1.8 / 17 June 2013; 11 years ago (2013-06-17) |
| Preview release | 2.0rc2 / 19 February 2018; 7 years ago (2018-02-19) |
| Typing discipline | duck,dynamic,strong |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| License | LGPL |
| Website | tug |
| Influenced by | |
| Metafont | |
MetaPost refers to both aprogramming language and theinterpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived fromDonald Knuth'sMetafont language and interpreter. MetaPost produces vector graphic diagrams from a geometric/algebraic description. The language shares Metafont's declarative syntax for manipulating lines, curves, points and geometric transformations. However,
Many of the limitations of MetaPost derive from features of Metafont. For instance, MetaPost does not support all features ofPostScript. Most notably, paths can have only one segment (so that regions aresimply connected), and regions can be filled only with uniform colours. PostScript level 1 supports tiled patterns and PostScript 3 supportsGouraud shading.
MetaPost is distributed with many distributions of theTeX and Metafont framework, for example, it is included in theMiKTeX and theTeX Live distributions.
The encapsulated postscript produced by Metapost can be included inLaTeX,ConTeXt, andTeX documents via standard graphics inclusion commands. The encapsulated postscript output can also be used with thePDFTeX engine, thus directly givingPDF. 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 andLuaTeX supports the inclusion of MetaPost code within the input file. Inclusion of MetaPost code in LaTeX is also possible by using LaTeX-packages, for examplegmp ormpgraphics.
This is a single fileexample.mp which when processed by the MetaPost interpreter (via the commandmpost onLinux) produces three eps filesexample.1,example.2,example.3. These are pictured on the right.
transformpagecoords;pagecoords:=identityscaled10mmshifted(100mm,150mm);beginfig(1)fill((0,0)--(2,0)--(2,1)--(1,1)--(1,2)--(0,2)--cycle)transformedpagecoordswithcolorgreen;draw((2,0)..(2,1)..(1,1)..(1,2)..(0,2))transformedpagecoords;drawarrow((0,0)--(2,2))transformedpagecoords;endfig;beginfig(2)draw(fori=0upto7:dir(135i)--endforcycle)transformedpagecoords;endfig;pagecoords:=identityscaled15mmshifted(100mm,150mm);beginfig(3);% declare paths to be usedpathp[],p[]t;% set up points by defining relationshipsz1=(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 pathsp0=fullcircleyscaled.5rotated45shiftedz0;p1=z2---z4..z0..z3---z1;p2=p1cutbeforep0cutafterp0;p3=p0cutbeforep1cutafterp1;p4=p2---p3---cycle;% define transformed versions of paths and pointsfori=0upto4:p[i]t=p[i]transformedpagecoords;endforfori=0upto5:z[i]t=z[i]transformedpagecoords;endfor% do some drawingfillp4twithcolor(1,1,0.2);drawz1t---z2twithcolor.5white;drawz3t---z4twithcolor.5white;pickuppencircle;drawp0tdashedwithdotsscaled.3;drawp1tdashedevenly;drawp2twithcolorblue;drawp3twithcolorred;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);fori=0upto4:drawdotz[i]twithpenpencirclescaled2;endforendfig;bye
The resulting three eps files can be used inTeX viaLaTeX's\includegraphics command,ConTeXt's\externalfigure, Plain TeX's\epsfbox command, or (in Plain pdftex) the\convertMPtoPDF command fromsupp-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 by default.
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