FWIW, MetaPost draws technical graphics. For instance, it is what Knuth uses for the graphics in his books. (Most LaTeX users these days seem to me to instead

FWIW, MetaPost draws technical graphics. For instance, it is what Knuth uses for the graphics in his books. (Most LaTeX users these days seem to me to instead use TikZ, or sometimes Asymptote.) The purpose of its --tex option is to allow you to format the labels to fit the document, using whatever TeX engine you use for your document. For instance, if you use XeTeX so you can access system fonts then you probably want the graphics to have labels using those fonts also, so you want MetaPost to use XeTeX also. There has been a lot of work lately on MetaPost; I don't know whether this is a recently-introduced bug, but I suspect it is. Anyway, such reports are useful, as for any software project. So if someone here has a similar one please forward it to the developers list. If you go to TUG's page http://www.tug.org http://www.tug.org and click on "mailing lists" you'll see a great number of options. In a pinch you could start with the "tex-live" one and you will for sure get some attention.