piechartMP Manual

5 Special Featuresfirstfirstthirdfourththirdfourthfirstfirstsecondsecondthirdfourththirdfourthfirstfirstsecondsecondfifthfifththirdfourththirdfourth5.2 Enhanced Graphics with MetaFunIf you look on a real round 3D object you will see, that the round outside is not a solidcolor. With the help of some other packages piechartMP is able to draw the segmentoutsides as gradients, in order to give the chart a more realistic look.Most recent T E X distributions include pdfT E X and ConT E Xt. ConT E Xt includes a META-POST package called MetaFun. That package enables METAPOST, besides many other interestingfeatures, to draw gradients 3 . The package should work out of the box, thus noConT E Xt setup is required, but the gradient-feature only works with pdfT E X.MetaFun writes some special statements in the METAPOST output. This requires an extensionto interpret those specials. The extension is loaded in the ConT E Xt macro packageautomatically, thus ConT E Xt users can embed the figure directly.The L A T E X graphics package does not load that extension. Thus L A T E X users have to go adifferent way. ConT E Xt includes a pdfT E X format called mptopdf . It can be downloadedfrom the ConT E Xt homepage [Con] as a independent package, called MPtoPDF. That formatcan be used stand-alone in order to convert your METAPOST output to PDF. This is eventhe best way to preview your METAPOST figures.Since that pdfT E X format loads the graphics extension resulting PDF-graphics have thesegment’s outside drawn as gradients. Next L A T E X users can include that PDF directly usingpdfL A T E X or convert the PDF back to EPS for the L A T E X-dvips way.piechartMP automatically detects MetaFun when the package is loaded prior piechartMP.See figure 11 to compare both ways of drawing segment outsides.input metafun;input piechartmp;3 The current version 1.0 of the PDF-Reader XPDF lacks support to display those gradients.28