thanks for the replies, moving the cursor is very handy :) anyway my problem was caused by fontconfig not being configured for the target platform (i'm cross compiling for a set top box and fontconfig was pointing to the font-cache on my development pc) fixing this and adding the adjustments with size and position solved everything <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:51 PM, Carl Worth <<a href="mailto:cworth@cworth.org">cworth@cworth.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d">On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:09:02 +0100, "Mehmet Kovacioglu" wrote: > thanks for the quick reply, > here's the code: </div>Hi Mehmet, Thanks for the code sample. This makes it much easier to spot the problem. <div class="Ih2E3d"> >     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 > -------------------- </div>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.). </blockquote></div>