Hello. Yesterday's answers cleared up a lot but they provoked some more. Please: - Say an application draws to a window and optionally, if a user would like to, it exports the drawing to PDF. How? If I understood Carl's recommendation correctly -- to use "data structures [which] know how to 'draw themselves' given a cairo context -- I probably could write some dummy drawing functions (lineto, circle, stroke, ...) which would just record [1] the drawing operations (and serialize to disk, e.g. in a text file). Later, I could parse that file and execute the real drawing function of a given surface. Does it make sense to you? - And a bit off topic, how does a zoom work? I mean, say there's a GTK window and I draw to it. Since it is raster now I can't really scale it, right? So I have to redraw it at the new scale, right? How, because all the drawing operations are lost now since I draw a raster image in the first place? Could a recording from the previous question be of some help? Well, I apologize for possibly "basic" questions, hopefully they make at least a bit sense... Thanks! [1] like <a href="http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2006-December/009013.html">http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2006-December/009013.html </a> T.