[metapost] Elegant interactive environment for Metapost / metafont?

[Nicola]

In article <AEF9E733-C10C-4000-89E7-FCDFB97AB3AE at frycomm.com>,
 William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:

> I'm looking at going back to work on a typeface project and want to (once 
> again) look into re-casting the fonts as metafonts.
> 
> Is there a nice, elegant, interactive previewing tool optimized for editing a 
> metafont?

Not that I know of. With TeXShop, you can typeset a .mf file with the 
nv-metapost engine and get a PDF preview of your font, one glyph per page. But 
TeXShop has no other specific MetaFont-editing features (e.g., syntax coloring). 
Besides, TeXShop is OS X only.

> I managed to find the MetaPostEngines.tar.bz2 which were posted to the OS X 
> TeX mailing list a while back (but it puts lots of figure-text information on 
> the .pdf)

I'm the author of those engines. Since the time I have posted to the mailing 
list, they have been improved quite a bit and the latest release is available at

http://users.dimi.uniud.it/~nicola.vitacolonna/home/content/metapost-engines-texs
hop

In particular, now you have better control over the output via special comments 
in your source file (see the documentation).

The engines are meant to be used with TeXShop, but since they are just Perl 
scripts, they can be also run from the command line or integrated into some 
other workflow.

Nicola