MetaPost 0.9 announcement

The MetaPost team is happy to announce a new release of MetaPost:

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MetaPost 0.9
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The sources and a win32 package can be downloaded immediately from

http://sarovar.org/projects/metapost/

The source package should compile normally on all systems that are
capable of compiling a modern web2c-based TeX distribution.

The win32 package is intended for fptex or a similar web2c-based
installation, and has been tested only with TeXLive 2003. These
executables will *not* work for miktex, sorry.

Of course, we welcome any comments (either good or bad) that you may
have. Simply replying to this message is fine, but see the bottom of
this message for a more formal way to report bugs and feature requests.

For those of you who have noted the large gap between 0.641 and 0.9:
We have deliberately chosen to step over some minor version numbers,
such that the first major release by the current team (this release
is planned for the autumn of 2005) can become version 1.0 without
causing additional confusion.


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What is new in version 0.9:
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1. There is a new internal quantity called mpversion that reports the
current metapost version, and the version information is also written
to the PostScript file.
2. The LaTeX sources of the mpman, mpintro, and mpgraph manuals have
become part of the distribution package.
3. TEX.mp now has TeX format support through a pair of macros called
TEXPRE() and TEXPOST(). This llows you to process the contents of
the TEX() macro with, for example, LaTeX (instead of plain TeX).
An example is given in the manual.
4. metapost now writes a %%HiReSBoundingBox comment
5. The EPS output no longer contains actual spaces within PostScript
strings as for example output by label("a space"), but their
octal escape (\040) instead.
6. The EPS output now also has a %%BeginProlog DSC comment
as well as %%EndProlog
7. The comments in the Web source have been changed to point out
that on modern machines, acquiring the random seed has actually
become a system-dependant operation (a granularity of whole seconds
is not small enough on new machines).
8. The 'newer' command now accepts more than 2 arguments, testing
each of the files in turn.

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Bugfixes in version 0.9:
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1. Documentation improvements: all known errata and typos have been
removed, better explanations of e.g. dash patterns and dotlabel have
been provided, and a number of omissions has been rectified.
2. The BoundingBox was not computed correctly when a filldraw command
with a noticeable pen size was used at the edge of the picture.
3. Paths starting with degenerate constructions like (0,0)--(0,0)--(0,0)
could overflow memory.
4. The PostScript output could accidentally contain 8-bit characters
within PostScript strings in previous versions because a test was
shared between terminal printing and PostScript printing.
5. A bug has been found in the assignment of serial numbers to
independant variables in metafont 2.71828. This bug affected MP as
well, and the same patch has been applied.
6. The turningnumber was sometimes wrong in unexpected ways. The new
implementation is still sometimes wrong (when there are strange path
segments involved), but in a much more predictable way: the new code
always draws straight lines between the actual points, and calculates
the turningnumber based on that path instead of the actual path. The
effect is that cusps and loops within segments are now completely
ignored. A more thorough fix of turningnumber is planned for the
next release.
7. There was an 'off by one' error in dvitomp wrt. the interpretation
of virtual fonts.
8. mpto uses a new TeX macro for the generation of labels, making it
more robust wrt. strange user code within the actual label text.
9. A missing colon in boxes.mp has been added
10. A missing save in mfplain.mp has been added
11. The generisize in boxes.mp has been fixed so that it now accepts
[[ as a valid variable name


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Legal notice / license / bug reports
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MetaPost is a system for producing graphics developed by John Hobby
at AT&T, based on Donald Knuth's Metafont.  The MetaPost home page
is http://tug.org/metapost.

MetaPost and related programs are in the public domain.

The MetaPost development project is currently hosted at Sarovar,
http://www.sarovar.org/projects/metapost; please report bugs and
request enhancements through there if possible. Alternatively, you
can reach us through the <metapost@tug.org> mailing list as well.
(Please do not send bug reports or feature requests directly to
Dr. Hobby any more)


Have fun!

Taco Hoekwater, for the MetaPost team, April 28, 2005

Taco,

Thanks for the heads-up.  I was wondering where one goes to request a
feature in MetaPost.  I think a beneficial utility like mptosvg would have
a be very helpful for converting MetaPost code to SVG.  Since SVG
(Scalable Vector Graphics) are becoming a standard for many web graphics
(Mozilla already supports them), it seems natural to have a utility to
convert MetaPost to SVG.

Thanks again!

Taco Hoekwater wrote:

>
> The win32 package is intended for fptex or a similar web2c-based
> installation, and has been tested only with TeXLive 2003. These
> executables will *not* work for miktex, sorry.
>
That is  - is there going to be a release that works also with miktex  in
the future ? Just because my experience is, that latex+win=miktex for
everybody I know.

Matthias

--
www.matthiaspospiech.de/latex/