MetaPost

MetaPost refers to both a programming language and the interpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived from Donald Knuth's Metafontlanguage 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, 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 producesencapsulated 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.