MetaPost pictures in PDFLaTeX

Question

To include MetaPost pictures in a latex file compiled by pdflatex I usually do something like

\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
...
\includegraphics{filename-without-mps}

but this requires all metapost output to have extension .mps (which is usually fine — one can just add the line filenametemplate "%j-%c.mps"; into .mp source). Is there a way to include mps pictures with their usual filenames (smth.1, smth.2, etc.)?

Update: I usually need it to recompile some old files with PDFLaTeX — so I need some recipe that adds couple of lines in the preamble but not requires to changes everything.

---

I tried to invent some hack (for Windows, to be compiled with pdflatex -enable-write18):

\usepackage[pdftex]{graphics}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.1}{pdf}{.1.pdf}{`copy #1 #1.eps && epstopdf #1.eps}
...
\includegraphics{smth.1}

which indeed generates smth.1.pdf but fails with the error

! Package pdftex.def Error: File `smth-1-converted-to.1.pdf' not found.

Update 2: The question was answered but maybe someone knows how to make this hack work?

Answer 1

Just do:

\DeclareGraphicsRule{.1}{mps}{*}{} 
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.2}{mps}{*}{} 
% etc. 

Answer 2

Almost five years after the question.

With the latest versions of Metapost it is possible to change the default naming scheme for output files: the statement

outputtemplate := "%j-%c.mps";

will produce, from file name.mp. files named as name-1.mps and so on. This is much preferable, because no further instruction is needed under pdflatex, which knows how to process MPS files.

Under LuaLaTeX, the luamplib package allows for direct embedding of Metapost code in the document.

The same is possible under all engines with the packages gmp or mpgraphics. The package emp also allows something similar, but with several limitations.

Answer 3

Do you know that there's a package for encapsulating metapost figures in LaTeX? It's called emp.