Hello, <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 4:15 PM, <<a href="mailto:robertk54@aol.com" target="_blank">robertk54@aol.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <div> <div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-top:0px"><div><pre><tt>>>>Another workaround is to prerender the text to a similar surface >>>(cairo_surface_create_similar) and paint that intermediate surface to >>>the destination surface with the correct offset. >> >> Would using the latter method prevent me from using semi-transparent text >> and / or backgrounds? > >It would not if you pass CAIRO_CONTENT_COLOR_ALPHA to the function, see ><a href="http://cairographics.org/manual/cairo-cairo-surface-t.html#cairo-surface-create-similar" style="font-family:Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:9pt" target="_blank">http://cairographics.org/manual/cairo-cairo-surface-t.html#cairo-surface-create-similar</a> > >Prerendering the text is much faster that having to render the text >again in every frame. It's only really a reasonable shortcut when the >text is only translated and perhaps rotated, but not zoomed though. </tt></pre></div><pre><tt>I would love to pre-render the text but I think my use case makes it a bit more complex. </tt></pre> <pre><tt>The video frame is a fixed size ARGB surface which makes sense. However, the text can </tt></pre><pre><tt>be any size </tt>and often much wider than the video image. I imagine this prevents me from being </pre> <pre>able to use 'create similar' since this would be using the video frame's surface, no? I guess </pre> <pre>I could create a new ARGB image surface using the text dimensions?</pre> <pre> </pre></div></div></blockquote>I have done this before using cairo and pango, basically a ticker bar on a N width screen with smooth scrolling. My approach was something like this: Make a text rendering surface 2 * N + C, C = 16 or such. do { Render text in the off screen part of the surface (which is now the rightmost half of the surface). Composite that surface from X=0 at X=0 to your main surface. Composite that surface from X=2 at X=0 to your main surface (assuming your step size = 2 pixels). When you reach X = 2N render in the offscreen part of the text render surface (which is now the leftmost half of the surface). } while (true); Regards, Leon. </div>