[2803] in SIPB bug reports
[hobby@research.att.com: MetaPost]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (amgreene@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Thu May 7 10:17:56 1992
From: amgreene@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 7 May 92 10:17:15 -0400
To: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: sipb-ec@Athena.MIT.EDU
Are we interested? There's a on-disclosure agreement to sign with AT&T,
so I thought I should ask before taking the initiative.
- Rhu
To: TeXhax@tex.ac.uk
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 92 10:41:00 -0500
From: hobby@research.att.com
Subject: MetaPost
Keywords: METAFONT, MetaPost, graphics, PostScript
At the TeX User's Group Meeting in August 1989, I first announced my plans to
create a picture-drawing language based on METAFONT but with PostScript output
and features for dealing with text as well as graphics. By the summer of 1990,
I had a preliminary version installed on a few machines here at Bell Labs, but
I was not able to make it available externally. Since then, I have perfected
the language implementation and the support software and I have written a User'
s
Manual, but I had trouble getting permission to make it available outside
of AT&T.
Now I can finally announce that the MetaPost language implementation is
available free to any academic institution. It is still necessary to sign a
non-disclosure agreement. Interested parties should contact me at the address
below and give an address where I can have the necessary paperwork sent.
Here are the main features of MetaPost:
1. The language is based on METAFONT and has almost the same syntax and
semantics. This includes data types for curves, pictures, and linear
transformations, as well as powerful macros and the ability to solve linear
equations.
2. Pictures can contain typeset text using any font for which you have a .tfm
file. MetaPost input can also contain text to be typeset with TeX (or
troff). There are predefined macros for things like positioning labels
and finding bounding boxes.
3. There are primitives and predefined macros for accessing PostScript features
such as colors and shades of gray, dashed lines, and clipping, and for
controlling the appearance of corners and ends of lines.
While it is possible to use MetaPost to generate Type 3 PostScript fonts, the
intended application is generating figures for technical documents. For this
reason, MetaPost output consists of PostScript files that can be merged with
TeX output using graphics inclusion features in dvi-to-PostScript translators.
Since many dvi-to-PostScript translators download TeX fonts by including only
those characters that are actually used by the .dvi file, extra provisions
are necessary to allow such fonts in PostScript files generated via MetaPost.
Version 5.47 of Tom Rokicki's dvips contains undocumented features for doing
this, but a few bug-fixes are necessary to make them work properly. You can
also use any dvi-to-PostScript program that understands encapsulated PostScript
with standard comments like "%%DocumentFonts: cmr10".
The actual MetaPost distribution contains web source for the translator
and auxiliary programs, change files for use with the standard UNIX (r)
TeX distribution (for use with web2c), auxiliary routines written in C,
and a shell script that controls the preprocessing of TeX commands found
in MetaPost input files. I will also include the bug fixes for dvips.
John Hobby hobby@research.att.com
AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Ave.
PO Box 636
Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636
