[metapost] MetaPost 0.891 announcement

[Taco Hoekwater]

The MetaPost team is happy to announce the release of a beta release:

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MetaPost 0.891 (beta for 0.9)
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This is a public beta release for the upcoming version 0.9. The
sources can be dowloaded immediately from

   http://sarovar.org/projects/metapost/

This source package should compile normally on all systems that are
capable of compiling a modern web2c-based TeX distribution. We hope
to have a Win32 binary-only release available for download somewhere
during the next week.

After beta testing, this version will hopefully become the next
official release of MetaPost, somewhere around the end of April 2005.

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.


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What is new in version 0.9:
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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 source of the mpman and mpgraph manuals has become part
    of the distribution package.
3. TEX.mp now has TeX format support through a pair of macros called
    TEXPRE() and TEXPOST().
4. metapost now writes the %%HiReSBoundingBox if prologues is set
    to a non-zero value
5. The EPS output no longer contains spaces within PostScript strings
6. The EPS output now also has a %%BeginProlog DSC comment
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).


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Bugfixes in version 0.9:
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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 contain 8-bit characters in previous
    versions.
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 knot 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 added1
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


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Legal notice / license / bug reports
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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 <metapost at tug.org> 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, March 20, 2005