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MetaPost refers to both a programming language and the only known interpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived from Donald Knuth's Metafont language and interpreter. MetaPost excels at producing diagrams in the PostScript programming language from a geometric/algebraic description. The language shares Metafont's elegant declarative syntax for manipulating lines, curves, points and geometric transformations. However, Software design is the process that starts from a problem for which there is currently no acceptable (software) solution, and ends when such a solution has been created. ... Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product. ... A software release is the distribution, whether public or private, of an initial or new and upgraded version of a computer software product. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 116th day of the year (117th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... // An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. ... Computer software can be organized into categories based on common function, type, or field of use. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... A website (alternatively, Web site or web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos and other digital assets that is hosted on one or several Web server(s), usually accessible via the Internet, cell phone or a LAN. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML... Image File history File links Portal. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... An interpreter is a computer program that executes other programs. ... Donald Ervin Knuth ( or Ka-NOOTH[1], Chinese: [2]) (b. ... METAFONT is a programming language used to define vector fonts. ... PostScript (PS) is a page description language used primarily in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. ... METAFONT is a programming language used to define vector fonts. ...

• 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 a simple RGB colour specification.
• The MetaPost language can include text labels on the diagrams, either strings from a specified font, or pretty much anything that can be typeset with TeX
• The Metafont interpreter was written by Donald Knuth under an open source license, allowing John D. Hobby to adapt the interpreter to his own ends, giving us MetaPost.

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, and 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 only be filled 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. METAFONT is a programming language used to define vector fonts. ... Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, is a graphics file format. ... METAFONT is a programming language used to define vector fonts. ... Cubic Bézier curve In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, a Bézier curve is a parametric curve important in computer graphics. ... METAFONT is a programming language used to define vector fonts. ... REDIRECT RGB color model ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... Donald Ervin Knuth ( or Ka-NOOTH[1], Chinese: [2]) (b. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... A geometrical object is called simply connected if it consists of one piece and doesnt have any circle-shaped holes or handles. Higher-dimensional holes are allowed. ... Gouraud shaded sphere - note the inaccuracies towards the edges of the polygons. ... Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language that provides a natural coordinate-based framework for technical drawing. ...

Availability, usage

MetaPost is distributed with many current 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. TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... METAFONT is a programming language used to define vector fonts. ... The TeX mascot, by Duane Bibby TEX, written as TeX in plain text, is a typesetting system written by Donald Knuth. ... TeX live is a TeX distribution which is advised as the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX [1]. TeX live has been developed since 1996 by collaboration between the TeX Users Group ^ http://www. ... This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Mac OS X (IPA: ) is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ...

The encapsulated postscript produced by Metapost is easily included in TeX, ConTeXt, and LaTeX documents via standard eps-inclusion commands. Particularly useful is the ability to include this output in the PDFTeX dialect of TeX, thus giving Portable Document Format output from TeX in a single step. 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. TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... Look up Context in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... pdfTeX is a variant of the TeX typesetting program originally written by Hàn Thể Thành. ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... Look up Context in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

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. This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ...

 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 are not included in the eps files produced by MetaPost. Image File history File links Metapost_ex. ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... Look up Context in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

References and external links

• The TeX users group (TUG) http://www.tug.org/ has a page devoted to MetaPost: http://www.tug.org/metapost.html
• John D. Hobby has a homepage at http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/index.html and some other pages and publications devoted to MetaPost
  • MetaPost homepage: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/MetaPost.html
  • 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.
• MetaFun (modules for Metapost) by Hans Hagen, [1]
• Donald Knuth: The METAFONTbook, (Computers and Typesetting Volume C) Addison-Wesley 1986. ISBN 0-201-13444-6
• Comprehensive T_EX Archive Network (CTAN): http://www.ctan.org/. Repository of the T_EX source and hundreds of add-ons and style files.
• (La)TeX Navigator provides 305 simple MetaPost examples: http://tex.loria.fr/prod-graph/zoonekynd/metapost/metapost.html