<div style="color: black; "> <div id="AOLMsgPart_0_e1198645-47fb-4d76-b435-c08d461f41ce" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><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" target="_blank" style="font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; ">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><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>