<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt">I am using GTK3.0 and the Cairo that came with Ubuntu 12.04. I am only just beginning with Cairo and have gone through the introductory tutorials and written some very tiny fragments to experiment and learn including the following for text: cairo_select_font_face(cr, "Arial", CAIRO_FONT_SLANT_NORMAL, CAIRO_FONT_WEIGHT_NORMAL); cairo_set_font_size(cr, 12); // <<<<< assume this is in pts cairo_set_source_rgb(cr, 0, 0, 0); const char * str = "This is text" ; cairo_font_extents_t fexts; cairo_font_extents ( cr, &fexts ) ; cairo_move_to(cr, 0,fexts.ascent); cairo_show_text(cr, str ); The text came out looking smaller than I had expected so I checked using Firefox, Chromium and Opera with the following tiny html file: <style> .some_class { padding: 0px; border: 2px solid green; } </style> <body> This is text </body> The three browsers showed the text in exactly the same way. The height of the capital letter T was 12 pixels for the browsers and only 8 pixels for the Cairo output. Why is this? Ken P.S. I was using screen capture and the GIMP Image Editor to view the pixels zooming 16x with a pixel grid. The ascent and descent for the Cairo font choice were 11 and 3 respectively. <div> </div></div></body></html>