Metapost beta 1.090 released

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi all,

I have just released the archive files for MetaPost 1.090, the
first official beta for the new stable version of MetaPost.

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What is new:
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This MetaPost release is based on MPlib. For those of you who are not
aware of the MPlib project yet:

MPlib is the name of the new, revamped version of the MetaPost
interpreter. It is implemented in Cweb, and internally consists
of a core library, an mpx generation library, and a frontend
driver program (mpost).

There are no changes to the MetaPost language, but nevertheless there
are some minor differences with the last pascal-web based version of
MetaPost (1.005):

* The MPlib distribution is released under the GPL version 2 or,
   at your option, any later version.

* The commandline is slightly different, run mpost --help for details.

* The mem file format is changed, you have to regenerate any
   existing ones.

* The new mpx generation library includes the label generation
   functionality that was previously provided by 'makempx', and
   this internal code will be used instead of an external program.
   That is, unless the MPXCOMMAND variable is set in the  environment
   or texmf.cnf. The 'mpware' programs became obsolete and are no
   longer included in the distribution.

* Most of the memory configuration variables from texmf.cnf
   have become obsolete due to dynamic reallocation. The four remaining
   ones are 'main_memory', 'hash_size', 'max_in_open', 'param_size'.
   These are only taken into account at mem generation time, the
   values are stored in and reloaded from the mem file.

* The core MPlib library does not interpret an initial '&' as anything
   special and it does not support re-initialization using a different
   mem file either. The command line program mpost _does_ interpret '&'
   as an alias for the -mem switch to preserve (some) compatility.

* The MPlib distribution includes lua script language bindings.

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You can get the sources and a cross-compiled mingw binary for Win32
from the usual place:

    http://foundry.supelec.fr/frs/?group_id=13&release_id=309

Have fun,

Taco


--
http://tug.org/metapost/