MetaPost is publicly available (fwd)

[Petr Sojka]

From: hobby at research.att.com
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 95 09:08 EST
To: CTAN-Ann at shsu.edu
Subject: MetaPost is publicly available

The MetaPost language is based on METAFONT, but it outputs PostScript
and it has facilities for including TeX output and manipulating the
resulting picture.  The user's manual and auxiliary documentation have
been available for some time
as        ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/cs/cstr/162.ps.Z
and       ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/cs/cstr/164.ps.Z

The MetaPost interpreter was previously available only on a limited
basis under non-disclosure agreement.  AT&T has now placed it in the
public domain.  The source distribution is available as
        ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/research/metapost.tar.Z
and it is mirrored in the CTAN archives as
       /tex-archive/graphics/metapost/metapost.tar.gz

It requires the Unix Web2c version of TeX and Rokicki's dvips.
Rokicki's dvips is needed because it has special support for using
downloaded TeX fonts in included figures.

There is also a DOS version of MetaPost, but its author wants to
update it before putting it in the archives.  It will not be available
until at least mid January.

I am interested in receiving bug reports but I probably will not be
able to answer questions about the installation process.

- John Hobby  hobby at research.att.com