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TikZ (together with its PGF backend) is the most widely used picture drawing tool by regulars here, having more than 50x as many questions as for Metapost, alongside a wealth of documentation and user support elsewhere. TikZ is supported by several of the most popular TeX engines, while Metapost has native support only in LuaTeX, needing invocation as a separate program from other platforms. And TikZ uses familiar TeX syntax, not requiring another macro-based language to be learned.

Yet Metapost has a band of loyal followers. There are "traditional" reasons for this: Metapost is more "Knuthian", being derived from Knuth's Metafont and by report is Knuth's preferred tool; Metapost is rather older than TikZ, and so some prefer it for reasons of sticking with the better-understood tool.

Are there other reasons why users might prefer Metapost to TikZ?

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  • I looked for thsi qn before asking and contrived to overlook an older qn, tex.stackexchange.com/questions/34523/pgf-tikz-vs-metapost - I guess I would not have asked the question, although this question asks for advantages of MP over Tikz from the viewpoint of an MP user, not differences between the two.
    – Charles Stewart
    Nov 8, 2012 at 10:52
  • Make no mistake that if you don't mind the dvips route it's as good as TikZ and sometimes even better because of the underlying PS engine. I've learned a lot after asking a similar question. See: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/60778/…
    – percusse
    Nov 8, 2012 at 10:52
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    Also I need to say that MP,PSTricks and others have a certain scientific vibe to it and TikZ is much more graphics based and neutral when it comes to documentation. I think the manual is making a tremendous difference in terms of popularity. I couldn't resist :)
    – percusse
    Nov 8, 2012 at 11:08
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    metapost has been used successfully in the development of new fonts. i'm not sufficiently familiar with the details of tikz to know if this is possible, but i suspect that, even if it is, it's more difficult/complicated.
    – barbara beeton
    Nov 8, 2012 at 17:03
  • @barbara - Right. Indeed, Latin Modern was developed using METATYPE1 (essentially some scripts, library support, and templates for turning Metapost figures into Type-1 fonts). There's no reason I can think of why some similar script/template system could not be put together for PGF, though I guess that PGF does not map onto Postscript in as clean a way as Metapost. If that's true, that's an answer.
    – Charles Stewart
    Nov 9, 2012 at 8:28

3 Answers 3

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Here are a few reasons why I use MetaPost.

  • MetaPost is tightly integrated into ConTeXt
  • MetaPost is by an order of magnitudes faster than TikZ
  • MetaPost is included in the TeX backend (in LuaTeX). That's one of the reasons where the speed gain comes from. Not being implemented in TeX is another.
  • I created some custom MetaPost macros ages ago which I still use and there is no reason to port it to a TikZ or to another package.
  • I find the MetaPost syntax easier to understand than TikZ
  • It has a brilliant manual (this does in no way imply that the Tikz manual is inferior)
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    The manual I was referring to is the MetaFun manual. It's not strictly MetaPost, but large parts are applicable to plain MetaPost as well.
    – Marco
    Apr 8, 2013 at 10:27
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    gmp package (ctan.org/pkg/gmp) integrates Metapost with LaTeX too. It also lets you use your LaTeX document parameters inside Metapost code.
    – mmj
    Apr 13, 2013 at 15:58
  • How about the capability of 3D drawing and plotting?
    – kiss my armpit
    Nov 9, 2013 at 1:59
  • Is there a good tutorial for drawing commutative diagrams with metapost?
    – qed
    Dec 29, 2016 at 21:49
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I don't know about Metapost. I use the Metapost inspired language Asymptote. I preferred it because I felt that it's

  • More general-purpose
  • C++-like and object-oriented (thus a soft learning curve for me)

That said, I still believe PGF/Tikz is very powerful and I do use circuitikz for circuit diagrams rather than draw all the electronic elements from scratch in Asymptote. I only wish I had more time to learn PGF/Tikz. I think the deciding factor for me was time.

Update

For what it's worth, I finally found the time to learn some TikZ and I totally get where you're coming from now: TikZ is a godsend!

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    I actually went in the opposite direction: I learned TikZ first, and then switched partially to Asymptote because of its 3D capabilities. But I still use TikZ sometimes.
    – Charles Staats
    Nov 9, 2013 at 2:42
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i expect that many metapost users are ex-metafont-users; if you're fluent in metafont, metapost's probably as good as anything. remember that pgf came along really rather recently; it's clear that it's a good _thing_, since its adoption has been exponentially fast, but old habits die hard.

(including my habit of almost never drawing anything, which dates back to the 1980s...)

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    I learnt Metapost without knowing Metafont, it's a very natural language indeed. In fact with Metapost you are able to do easy things quickly, and hard things easily, once you have spent some time in learning it.
    – mmj
    Apr 13, 2013 at 15:53

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