Drawing-with-METAPOST

Toby Thurston – 31 Oct 2024

This project provides a document that discusses how to draw technical diagrams with John Hobby's METAPOST language. It includes over 200 illustrations created with METAPOST, complete with source code as inspiration and examples. The intended level is for intermediate to advanced users rather than complete beginners. For introductions, tutorials, and other articles about METAPOST, see http://www.tug.org/metapost.html

Start with Drawing-with-Metapost.pdf in the top directory.

The src directory contains

• the TeX source for the main document
• the style file used for marking up METAPOST source code
• the METAPOST source for each illustration used in the main document
• the corresponding PDF files created from each MP source file

The text includes a discussion of the techniques used for drawing the illustrations, and includes complete or partial listings for most of them. These listings are included directly from the source code used, so in all cases the output should exactly match what you see on the page.

You might like to read the main document first, but you might also like to browse through the PDFs in the src directory, and when you find one that is interesting, have a look at the corresponding MP source file. There is a one-to-one match between the PDF names and the MP source names, so geometry-apollonius.pdf is created from geometry-apollonius.mp. The src directory contains a few drawings that are not included in the main document.

To update the main PDF document I follow these steps

• build any new or updated METAPOST source files with lualatex to create PDFs in the src directory
• build the main tex file with lualatex -recorder Drawing-with-Metapost
• run a Python script to read the .fls and git add all the files used
• git commit and push

If you find any errors, or have any suggestions for improvement, please raise an issue or submit a pull request on Github.

Copyright (c) 2024 by Toby Thurston. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).