MetaPost

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article is written like a manual or guide. Please help rewrite this article and remove advice or instruction. (January 2016) This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

MetaPost

Paradigm	imperative, typesetting
Designed by	John D. Hobby
Developer	Taco Hoekwater, Luigi Scarso
First appeared	1994 (1994)
Stable release	1.8 / 17 June 2013; 10 years ago (2013-06-17)
Preview release	2.0rc2 / 19 February 2018; 6 years ago (2018-02-19)
Typing discipline	duck, dynamic, strong
OS	Cross-platform
License	LGPL
Website	tug.org/metapost
Influenced by
Metafont

MetaPost refers to both a programming language and the interpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived from Donald Knuth's Metafont language and interpreter. MetaPost produces vector graphic diagrams from a geometric/algebraic description. The language shares Metafont's 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 produces EPS, SVG, or PNG 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 graphics (lines, Bézier curves)
• Metafont output is monochrome, whereas MetaPost uses RGB or CMYK colors.
• The MetaPost language can include text labels on the diagrams, either strings from a specified font, or anything else that can be typeset with TeX.
• Starting with version 1.8, Metapost allows floating-point arithmetic with 64 bits (default: 32 bit fixed-point arithmetic)

Many of the limitations of MetaPost derive from features of Metafont. For instance, MetaPost does not support all features of PostScript. Most notably, paths can have only one segment (so that regions are simply connected), and regions can be filled only with uniform colours. PostScript level 1 supports tiled patterns and PostScript 3 supports Gouraud shading.