A Beginner's Guide to METAPOST for Creating High-quality Graphics

Individuals that use TEX or any of its derivatives to typeset their documents generally take extra measures to ensure paramount visual quality. Such documents often contain mathematical expressions and graphics to accompany the text. Since TEX was designed for the creation of beautiful books -and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics 4, it is clear that it is sufficient and in fact exceptional at dealing with mathematics and text. TEX was not designed for creating graphics however, certain add-on packages can be used to create modest figures. TEX, however, is capable of including graphics created with other utilities in a variety of formats. Because of their scalability, Encapsulated PostScript EPS graphics are the most common types used. This paper introduces METAPOST and demonstrates the fundamentals needed to generate high-quality EPS graphics for inclusion into TEX-based documents.