Drawing METAPOST pictures with BSD Owl Scripts

METAPOST, a program my John Hobby, is a powerful language for creating technical drawings and it is found in most if not all TeX distributions. While most LaTeX compilation assistants do not pay much attention to METAPOST, it is very well integrated in BSD Owl Scripts so that preparing a LaTeX document containing beautiful METAPOST pictures is achieved by a Makefile as simple as

DOCUMENT=        galley.tex
SRCS+=           figures.mp
.include "latex.doc.mk"

It is also possible to produce pictures for themselves, using a Makefile similar to

DOCUMENT=        figures.mp
MPDEVICE=        eps pdf png svg
.include "mpost.doc.mk"

It will produce EPS, PDF, PNG and SVG versions of the figures.

If you do not know METAPOST here are few figures drawn with it:

These pictures are examples found in my Blueprint project, a library of METAPOST definitions. This project also illustrates the use of BSD Owl Scripts to produce METAPOST pictures.

See also: Producing LaTeX documents (BSD Owl Scripts documentation), TeX Users Group page dedicated to METAPOST, André Heck's METAPOST tutorial.