Simon, thank you for your response and feedback. I had to use apt-get to download and install Cairo and was then able to compile using the commands you suggested. I know that it seems obvious now.but your contribution saved me hours of effort. I don't think you know how much help you were. Thank you. <div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 14, 2013 8:28 PM, "Simon Sapin" <<a href="mailto:simon.sapin@exyr.org">simon.sapin@exyr.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Le 14/01/2013 08:19, peter shadbolt a écrit : <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> No - that would be a bad assumption on my part. When I tried compiling my program I encountered fatal error cairo.h no such file or directory so I assumed I needed to download and install the libraries. I'll look more closely at that error. </blockquote> You need to tell your compiler where to find cairo.h with something like -I/usr/include/cairo. However you probably need more of these compiler flags. On Linux, the pkg-config can give them to you. In turn, you should tell pkg-config which cairo backends you’ll be using. gcc $(pkg-config --cflags --libs cairo cairo-ft cairo-pdf) … I’m sure you can find many resources on the web about building C programs, header files, compiler flags, pkg-config etc. -- Simon Sapin </blockquote></div>