[metapost] MetaPost 1.890 announcement

[Taco Hoekwater]

I am happy to announce a new release of MetaPost:

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MetaPost 1.890
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This is a preliminary release in preparation for TeX Live 2014. It is main new
feature is the promised ‘decimal’ number system that is now operational (but has 
not been tested extensively yet). Also, some of the open bugs have been fixed.

A source archive can be downloaded from the files section at

 https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/metapost/

You can also do an anonymous subversion checkout:

 $ svn checkout --username anonsvn https://foundry.supelec.fr/svn/metapost/tags/1.890

The password is anonsvn

I am no longer able to cross-compile for Win32, so Windows users will have to wait
for Akira Kakuto and/or Mojca Miklavec’s binaries.

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What is new in MetaPost version 1.890:
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* The numbersystem 'decimal' is now operational.

* New internal: 'numberprecision', for use with 'the 'decimal' number
  system. The (numeric) value expresses the desired calculation precision, 
  in decimal places.

  system  default   min    max
  ============================
  scaled       10    10     10  (assignment effectively ignored)
  double       16    16     16  (assignment effectively ignored)
  decimal      34     1   1000 

* Bug fix: in the 'double' numbersystem, 

    if X = scantokens decimal X:

  will now always be true, because the 'decimal' operator now has 
  the same resolution as the scanning routine (which is two decimal
  places more than in the previous release).

* Fixed a bug in the handling of the / operator (wrong precendence).
 
* Fixed a bug in arctime (did not handle negative values currectly).

* Fixed TFM generation issues (various scale-related errors).

* Fixed application crashes when there was no TEXMF tree to be found
  anywhere.

* It is no longer possible to assign to the 'numbersystem' internal.

* There is a new definition of 'drawdot' in plain.mp.

* PNG output did not output anything for draws of a single point.

* Metapost now prints the full name of any preloaded files.

* Fixed a bug in the handling of labels with embedded ascii zero(es).

* Fixed handling of unknown command-line options, the reporting
  on used libraries in the --version output, and the banner line.


Have fun!


Taco Hoekwater, for the MetaPost team, March 11, 2014