mfpic-doc.pdf.

1 Introduction
1.1 Why?
Tom got the idea for MFPIC 1 mostly out of a feeling of frustration. Different output mechanisms for
printing or viewing TEX DVI files each have their own ways to include pictures. More often than not,
there are provisions for including graphic objects into a DVI file using TEX \special’s. However,
this technique seemed far from TEX’s ideal of device independence because different TEX output
drivers recognize different \special’s, and handle them in different ways.
LATEX’s picture environment has a hopelessly limited supply of available objects to draw—if
you want to draw a graph of a polynomial curve, you’re out of luck.
There was, of course, PICTEX, which was wonderfully flexible and general, but its most obvious
feature was its speed—or rather lack of it. Processing a single picture in PICTEX (in those days)
could often take several seconds.
It occurred to Tom that it might be possible to take advantage of the fact that METAFONT is
designed for drawing things. The result of pursuing this idea was MFPIC, a set of macros for TEX
and METAFONT which incorporate METAFONT-drawn pictures into a TEX file.
With the creation of METAPOST by John Hobby, and the almost universal availability of free
POSTSCRIPT interpreters like GHOSTSCRIPT, some MFPIC users wanted to run their MFPIC output
through METAPOST, to produce POSTSCRIPT pictures. Moreover, users wanted to be able to use
pdfTEX, which did not get along well with PK fonts, but was quite happy with METAPOST pictures.
So METAPOST support was added to MFPIC. This got us a little bit away from device independence,
but many users were not much concerned with that: they just wanted a convenient way to have text
and pictures described in the same document file.
With the extra capabilities of POSTSCRIPT (e.g., color) and the corresponding abilities of META-
POST, there was a demand for some MFPIC interface to access them. Consequently, switches (options)
have been added to access some of them. When these are used, output files may no longer be
compatible with METAFONT.
1.2 Who?
The original MFPIC (and still the core of the current version) was written primarily by Tom Leathrum
during the late (northern hemisphere) spring and summer of 1992, while at Dartmouth College.
Different versions were being written and tested for nearly two years after that, during which time
Tom finished his Ph.D. and took a job at Berry College, in Rome, GA. Between fall of 1992 and fall
of 1993, much of the development was carried out by others. Those who helped most in this process
are credited in the Acknowledgements.
Somewhere in the mid 1990’s the development passed to Geoffrey Tobin who kept things going
for several years.
The addition of METAPOST support was carried out by Dan Luecking around 1997–99. He is
also responsible for all other additions and changes since then, with help from Geoffrey and a few
others mentioned in the Acknowledgements.
1.3 What?
See the README file for a list of files in the distribution and a brief explanation of each. Only three are
actually needed for full access to MFPIC’s capabilities: mfpic.dtx, mfpic.ins and grafbase.dtx.
Running LATEX on mfpic.ins creates the only required files:
mfpic.tex and mfpic.sty, the latter required only for LATEX.
grafbase.mf, required only if METAFONT will be processing figures.
1 ‘MFPIC’ is pronounced by spelling the first two letters: ‘em-eff-pick’.
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