<html> <body> <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Uhm... how exactly are you determining what sources are classified as opaque here?</blockquote> There is a _cairo_pattern_is_opaque convenience function in cairo-pattern.c. There is a caveat listed concerning patterns and gradients: * Convenience function to determine whether a pattern is an opaque (alpha==1.0) solid color pattern. This is done by testing whether the pattern's alpha value when converted to a byte is 255, so if a backend actually supported deep alpha channels this function might not do the right thing. If I understand this correctly a "deep channel" is one that supports values in the whole range of a short. Which part of the code determines if a specified color uses the whole range of values of a short VS 0-255 for each channel? Knowing this would help going around this caveat. <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">So fill() can have the exact sample problem as paint(). And obviously stroke(), mask(), and show_text() can also "read" from outside the surface bounds.</blockquote> You're absolutely right. I'll look more into this. Thanks for the feedback, Antoine</body> </html>