[metapost] A couple of basic questions

[Will Robertson]

Hello,

I've finally started to look into metapost for plotting my graphs,  
since it seems like the best options with regards to graph output  
quality and being able to blend the graph labels with the body text  
of whichever document the graph is placed in.

My first question is: has no-one created anything more advanced than  
mpgraph? I ask not because I think mpgraph is deficient (it seems  
really good, actually), just curious. All I've come across is
  - gpdata.mp, which looks useful, and
  - matlab.mp, which gives me errors, and doesn't make me too  
confident about using it.

Anyway, I'm mostly interested in 2D plots for now, and I'll leave 3D  
plots to MATLAB for now.


Secondly: I'm not too sure what advantages latexmp has over just using
   verbatimtex
   %&latex
   \documentclass{article}
   % ...
   \begin{document}
   etex

Is latexmp a "recommended" package?


Finally: editors for Mac OS X? I'm using TeXShop, which seems fine  
enough with a basic shell script (see below) to convert the output to  
PDF, but is anything better around? (Not counting emacs, which I'm  
reluctant to embrace at the moment -- I have used it in the past.)

   #!/bin/bash
   path={$path;/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current;/usr/ 
local/bin}
   mpost $1;
   mpname=`basename $1 ".mp"`
   mptopdf $mpname;
   mv $mpname-1.pdf $mpname.pdf;


Thanks,

Will Robertson