UK TeX FAQ -- question label mfptutorials

### 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.

There is also an article on how to run both Metafont and MetaPost (the programs). Peter Wilson’s Some Experiences in Running Metafont and MetaPost 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.

Other MetaPost tutorials that have appeared are two in English by André Heck and Urs Oswald, and one in French (listed here because it’s clearly enough written that even this author understands it), by Laurent Chéno; both have been recommended for inclusion in the FAQ

Urs Oswald’s tutorial is accompanied by a super tool (by Troy Henderson) for testing little bits of MetaPost, which is an invaluable aid to the learner: http://www.tlhiv.org/mppreview

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
`Peter Wilson’s “experiences”`
  info/metafont/metafp/metafp.pdf
`Vincent Zoonekynd’s examples`
  info/metapost/examples (or browse the directory)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mfptutorials