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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label MP</title>
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<h3>What is MetaPost?</h3>
<p/>The MetaPost system (by John Hobby) implements a picture-drawing language
very much like that of Metafont except that it outputs Encapsulated PostScript
files instead of run-length-encoded bitmaps.  MetaPost is a powerful
language for producing figures for documents to be printed on PostScript
printers, either directly or embedded in (La)TeX documents. It
includes facilities for directly integrating TeX text and
mathematics with the graphics. (Knuth tells us that he uses nothing
but MetaPost for diagrams in text that he is writing.)
<p/>Although PDFLaTeX cannot ordinarily handle PostScript graphics, the
output of MetaPost is sufficiently simple and regular that PDFLaTeX
can handle it direct, using code borrowed from ConTeXt &mdash; see
<a href="FAQ-pdftexgraphics.html">graphics in PDFLaTeX</a>.
<p/>Much of MetaPost&rsquo;s source code was copied from Metafont&rsquo;s sources, with
Knuth&rsquo;s permission.
<p/>A mailing list discussing MetaPost is available;

  subscribe via the 
  <a href="http://lists.tug.org/metapost">TUG <i>mailman</a> interface</i>.
The TUG website also hosts a 
<a href="http://tug.org/metapost.html">MetaPost summary page</a>.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=MP">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=MP</a>
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