Description of problem: At http://www-sp.iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/software/xfig/ there are available extra pages for fig2dev which make it work better with Metapost and ppower4 postprocessor. For the later see http://www-sp.iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/software/ppower4/index.html More about these patches can be found on a referenced page and also in comments included with the patch. In case you would decide to use that I attach that patch in a "regular" format. This patch also includes my updates to fig2dev manpage.
Created attachment 88753 [details] more fixes to fig2dev
it seems the patch was already included in transfig-3.2.4.