Metafont and MetaPost Tutorials
Apart from Knuth’s book, there seems to be only one publicly-available
tutorial for Metafont, by
Christophe Grandsire (a copy in PDF form may be downloaded).
Geoffrey Tobin’s Metafont for Beginners
(see using Metafont) describes how the Metafont
system works and how to avoid some of the potential pitfalls.
Peter Wilson’s experience of running both Metafont and MetaPost (the
programs), Some Experiences in Running Metafont and MetaPost
(available on ctan) offers the benefit of Peter’s experience (he
has designed a
number of ‘historical’ fonts using Metafont). For Metafont the article is
geared towards testing and installing new Metafont fonts, while its MetaPost
section describes how to use MetaPost illustrations in LaTeX and
PDFLaTeX documents, with an emphasis on how to use appropriate
fonts for any text or mathematics.
Hans Hagen (of ConTeXt fame) offers a MetaPost tutorial called
MetaFun (which admittedly concentrates on the use of MetaPost within
ConTeXt). It may be found on his company’s
‘manuals’ page.
Another MetaPost tutorial in English is:
http://www.tlhiv.org/MetaPost/tutorial/ by Urs Oswald.
One in French (listed here because it’s clearly enough written
that even this author understands it),
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~cheno/metapost/metapost.pdf
by Laurent Chéno.
Urs Oswald’s tutorial uses Troy Henderson’s tool
(http://www.tlhiv.org/mppreview) for testing little bits of
MetaPost; it is an invaluable aid to the learner:
http://www.tlhiv.org/mppreview
A three-part introduction, by Mari Voipio, was published in
\TUGboat34(1) (Entry-level MetaPost: On the grid),
\TUGboat34(2)
(Entry-level MetaPost: Move it!), and
\TUGboat34(2) (Entry-level MetaPost: Color).
Vincent Zoonekynd’s massive set of example MetaPost files is available on
CTAN; the set includes a Perl script to convert the
set to html, and the set may be
viewed on the web.
While these examples don’t exactly constitute a “tutorial”, they’re
most certainly valuable learning material. Urs Oswald presents a
similar document,
written more as a document, and presented in PDF.
- Beginners’ guide
- info/metafont/beginners/metafont-for-beginners.pdf; catalogue entry
- Peter Wilson’s “experiences”
- info/metafont/metafp/metafp.pdf; catalogue entry
- Vincent Zoonekynd’s examples
- info/metapost/examples (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
This answer last edited: 2014-02-18
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