The MetaPost team is happy to announce the release of a new beta:
---------------------------------------------------------------------- MetaPost 0.893 (beta for 0.9) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a public beta release for the upcoming version 0.9. 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. The executables will *not* work for miktex, sorry.
After beta testing, this version will hopefully become the next official release of MetaPost, at the end of April 2005. That is roughly two weeks from today, so test reports are very welcome.
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- What is new in version 0.9: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bugfixes in version 0.9: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Legal notice / license / bug reports ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 12, 2005
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