Metafont and MetaPost Tutorials
Apart from Knuth’s book, there seems to be only one publicly-available
tutorial for Metafont, by
Christophe Grandsire (a copy in PDF form may be downloaded).
Geoffrey Tobin’s Metafont for Beginners
(see using Metafont) describes how the Metafont
system works and how to avoid some of the potential pitfalls.
There is also an article on how to run both Metafont and MetaPost (the
programs). Peter Wilson’s
Some Experiences in Running Metafont and MetaPost
offers the benefit of Peter’s experience (he has designed a number of
‘historical’ fonts using Metafont). For Metafont the article is geared
towards testing and installing new Metafont fonts, while its MetaPost
section describes how to use MetaPost illustrations in LaTeX and
PDFLaTeX documents, with an emphasis on how to use appropriate
fonts for any text or mathematics.
Other MetaPost tutorials that have appeared are two in English by
André Heck
and Urs Oswald,
and one in French (listed here because it’s clearly enough written
that even this author understands it), by
Laurent Chéno;
both have been recommended for inclusion in the FAQ
Urs Oswald’s tutorial is accompanied by a super tool (by Troy
Henderson) for testing little bits of MetaPost, which is an invaluable
aid to the learner: http://www.tlhiv.org/mppreview
Vincent Zoonekynd’s massive set of example MetaPost files is available on
CTAN; the set includes a Perl script to convert the
set to html, and the set may be
viewed on the web.
While these examples don’t exactly constitute a “tutorial”, they’re
most certainly valuable learning material. Urs Oswald presents a
similar document,
written more as a document, and presented in PDF.
- Beginners’ guide
- info/metafont/beginners/metafont-for-beginners.pdf
- Peter Wilson’s “experiences”
- info/metafont/metafp/metafp.pdf
- Vincent Zoonekynd’s examples
- info/metapost/examples (or browse the directory)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mfptutorials