[metapost] MetaPost 1.503 (beta version)

[Taco Hoekwater]

We are happy to announce a new beta release of MetaPost:

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MetaPost 1.503
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The standalone distribution package and a win32 binary can be downloaded
immediately from

   http://foundry.supelec.fr/gf/project/metapost/

This is a beta release following the major internal rewrite done
for 1.500. Also, this is the last 1.50x version to be released as
development/testing; the next release will be in the stable release
tree, to replace the current 1.2xx series.

The win32 binary is intended for texlive or a similar web2c-based
installation, this executable will *not* work for miktex.

Of course, we welcome any comments (either good or bad) that you may
have. Simply replying to this message is fine, but see the bottom of
the message for a more formal way to report bugs and feature requests.

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What is new in MetaPost version 1.503:
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* String comparisons have been fixed, these were broken in previous
   1.50x versions.

* verbatimtex ... etex processing had a horrible bug that is now
   fixed.

* A fix has been applied for a bug that made redeclared variable
   subscript tags disappear.

* The behavior of the %{<internal>} escape sequence in 'outputtemplate'
   changed (but not that of the single-letter shortcuts).  Internal
   variables within %{...} are neither rounded nor zero-padded.

* A very long list of improvements to the manual.

* MetaPost now adheres to the openin_any / openout_any settings in
   texmf.cnf

* The 'prologues:=3 output' with embedded labels was unreliable,
   especially when the resulting eps was included into a TeX document
   via dvips.

* 'newinternal numeric' has been fixed, it generated an error in
   metapost 1.211 and earlier 1.50x versions.

* Label regeneration sometimes failed to run when the file time stamps
   were close together.


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Legal notice / license / bug reports
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MetaPost is a system for producing graphics developed by John Hobby
at AT&T, based on Donald Knuth's Metafont.  The MetaPost home page
is http://tug.org/metapost.

MetaPost is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2.1 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

The MetaPost development project is currently hosted at Supelec,
http://foundry.supelec.fr/gf/project/metapost; with a bug tracker
at http://tracker.luatex.org/. Please report bugs and
request enhancements through there if possible. Alternatively, you
can reach us through the <metapost at tug.org> mailing list as well.

Have fun!

Taco Hoekwater, for the MetaPost team, October 22, 2010