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## Chapter 4. MetaPost

### Note

The contents of this section was taken from `mpost(1)`.

MetaPost is a programming language much like Knuth's Metafont except that it outputs PostScript programs instead of bitmaps. Borrowed from Metafont are the basic tools for creating and manipulating pictures. These include numbers, coordinate pairs, cubic splines, affine transformations, text strings, and boolean quantities. Additional features facilitate integrating text and graphics and accessing special features of PostScript such as clipping, shading, and dashed lines. Another feature borrowed from Metafont is the ability to solve linear equations that are given implicitly, thus allowing many programs to be written in a largely declarative style. By building complex operations from simpler ones, MetaPost achieves both power and exibility.

## 4.1 Options

MetaPost understands the following command line options.

### 4.1.1 `--file-line-error-style`

Print error messages in the form `file:line:error` which is similar to the way many compilers format them.

### 4.1.2 `--help`

Print help message and exit.

### 4.1.3 `--ini`

Be inimpost, for dumping bases; this is implicitly true if the program is called as inimpost.

### 4.1.4 `--interaction mode`

Sets the interaction mode. The mode can be one of `batchmode`, `nonstopmode`, `scrollmode`, and `errorstopmode`. The meaning of these modes is the same as that of the corresponding commands.

### 4.1.5 `--jobname name`

Use `name` for the job name, instead of deriving it from the name of the input file.

### 4.1.6 `--kpathsea-debug bitmask`

Sets path searching debugging flags according to the `bitmask`. See the Kpathsea manual for details.

### 4.1.7 `--mem mem`

Use `mem` as the name of the mem to be used, instead of the name by which MetaPost was called or a `%&` line.

### 4.1.8 `--parse-first-line`

If the first line of the main input file begins with `%&` parse it to look for a dump name or a `--translate-file` option.

### 4.1.9 `--progname name`

Pretend to be program `name`. This affects both the format used and the search paths.

### 4.1.10 `--recorder`

Enable the filename recorder. This leaves a trace of the files opened for input and output in a file with extension `.fls.`

### 4.1.11 `-T`

Produce TROFF output.

### 4.1.12 `--translate-file tcxname`

Use the `tcxname` translation table.

### 4.1.13 `--troff`

As -T.

### 4.1.14 `--version`

Print version information and exit.

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