[cairo] unable to render text

[Carl Worth]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:09:02 +0100, "Mehmet Kovacioglu" wrote:
> thanks for the quick reply,
> here's the code:

Hi Mehmet,

Thanks for the code sample. This makes it much easier to spot the
problem.

>     cairo_stroke(cr);
>
> ------------------
>     up till here everything works fine
>  ------------------
>
>     cairo_set_source_rgb (cr, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0);
>     cairo_select_font_face (cr, "sansserif",
>                 CAIRO_FONT_SLANT_NORMAL, CAIRO_FONT_WEIGHT_BOLD);
>     cairo_set_font_size (cr, 22);
>     cairo_text_extents (cr, "ABC", &te);
>     cairo_show_text (cr, "ABC");
>
> --------------------
> the part above isnt shown in the resulting png file
> --------------------

So the problem here is that you're never providing a position for
where you'd like the cairo_show_text text to be placed.

It's arguably an API error on our part that we didn't make you pass an
(x,y) coordinate to that function---in which case it would have been
obvious to you how to position the text.

Instead, we took a cue from the PostScript specification and used the
current path point as the position for cairo_show_text[*]. Since the
last path-based operation you did was cairo_stroke and since it
destroys the current path, then cairo assumes a current point of (0,0)
for your text origin. And since the origin is to the lower-left of the
glyphs for your font, none of your text is appearing on your image.

If you had examined the contents of the te structure then you perhaps
would have noticed that they describe a rectangle with negative Y
coordinates.

To fix this, insert something like the following just before the
cairo_show_text call:

	cairo_move_to (cr, 25, 25);

and you should be all set. I do hope you have fun with cairo!

-Carl

[*] The advantage that it does have is that subsequent calls to
cairo_show_text do continue the natural left-to-right layout that
cairo_show_text uses:

	cairo_move_to (cr, x, y);
	cairo_show_text (cr, "One ");
	cairo_show_text (cr, "word ");
	cairo_show_text (cr, "at ");
	cairo_show_text (cr, "a ");
	cairo_show_text (cr, "time.");

But that's still obviously extremely limited text layout. For anything
more sophisticated in terms of layout, we highly recommend using pango
and it's cairo integration instead, (it will do line-breaking,
right-to-left layout, properly support Arabic, etc. etc.).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20080319/48a5edcd/attachment-0001.pgp