Table of Contents
The contents of this section was taken from mpost(1).
MetaPost is a programming language much like Knuth's Metafont except that it outputs PostScript programs instead of bitmaps. Borrowed from Metafont are the basic tools for creating and manipulating pictures. These include numbers, coordinate pairs, cubic splines, affine transformations, text strings, and boolean quantities. Additional features facilitate integrating text and graphics and accessing special features of PostScript such as clipping, shading, and dashed lines. Another feature borrowed from Metafont is the ability to solve linear equations that are given implicitly, thus allowing many programs to be written in a largely declarative style. By building complex operations from simpler ones, MetaPost achieves both power and exibility.
MetaPost understands the following command line options.
Print error messages in the form file:line:error which is similar to the way many compilers format them.
Sets the interaction mode. The mode can be one of batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode, and errorstopmode. The meaning of these modes is the same as that of the corresponding commands.
Use mem as the name of the mem to be used, instead of the name by which MetaPost was called or a %& line.
If the first line of the main input file begins with %& parse it to look for a dump name or a --translate-file option.