Metapost and TeX [OT]

[skhilji@tampabay.rr.com]

I don't have any experience in metapost.  I would appreciate if someone would please answer this question without me having to do thru tutorials and metapost source code.

I was wondering how does metapost talk to TeX?  Quicky glancing through the metafun book, I found out that you can super-impose text typeset by TeX on top of a diagram.  I imagine you could do the same with mathematical equations too.

So how does metapost interact with TeX?  Let me guess:

1)  Metapost could first write down to a file the text that it wan't TeX to typeset.  It could then run TeX on the file.  TeX produces a DVI file and metapost reads it back.  It can then superimpose it on top of a picture.

2)  Metapost could also be including within itself a simplified version of TeX.  But that would be reinventing the wheel.

So how does it happen in reality?

The reason that I am asking is that I am interested in producing some diagrams using the libHARU PDF library (a C++ library to produce PDF files).  Beautiful Text support, however, is missing from the library.  I was wondering if I could hack it up so that I could somehow use TeX for the text part and C++ calls for the graphics part.