[metapost] MetaPost 0.891 announcement

[Stephan Hennig]

Taco Hoekwater schrieb:

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> MetaPost 0.891 (beta for 0.9)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

> 2. The LaTeX source of the mpman and mpgraph manuals has become part
>     of the distribution package.

When trying to compile the documentation on Windows using msys I
stumbled over some problems.

First, I have set environment variable TEX=latex on my system. Compiling
manfig.mp fails because it needs TeX instead of LaTeX. A possible
solution were to invoke mpost with the --tex=tex switch in the Makefile.

Second, in the source files manfig.mp, mpman.tex and mpgraph.tex
postscript font names are used that don't exist in my environment
(MiKTeX on Windows). After replacing rptmr by ptmr8r in manfig.mp and
rpsyr by psyr in mpman.tex and mpgraph.tex the manuals compile fine.

While I don't know how to avoid the problem with different postscript
font names on source file level, I think some words should be spent in
mpman on how to get the correct names or at least a pointer to another
document should be added in section 7. And to lower the threshold for
MiKTeX users, which I think has a quite large user base, the name ptmr8r
should be mentioned on page 21 besides "... rptmr or ps-times-roman
instead of Times-Roman." maybe with an explicit remark for MiKTeX users
(and possibly do that for other distributions as well).


> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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.

I see lots of additional improvements in mpman and mpgraph. Thanks!


> 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.

How is the TeX macro related to verbatimtex/btex...etex. Do they work in
parallel with different document preambles? An additional remark
clarifying this should be added to section 12 in mpman.

Taco, thanks alot for the progress on MetaPost and keep up the good work!

Regrads,
Stephan Hennig