<div dir="ltr">I absolutely agree that using the font extents for this works better. </div><div class="gmail_extra"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <<a href="mailto:ldo@geek-central.gen.nz" target="_blank">ldo@geek-central.gen.nz</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">This code sample <<a href="http://cairographics.org/samples/text_align_center/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://cairographics.org/samples/text_align_center/</a>> is supposed to show how to center text around a position both horizontally and vertically. I don’t think the vertical centring looks good. If you want to do accurate vertical centring, the formula I came up with is text_mid_y = (- 2 * text_extents.y_bearing - text_extents.height) / 2 However, I find that it looks a bit better overall to do the vertical centring based on the font metrics, rather than that of the specific text: font_mid_y = (font_extents.ascent - font_extents.descent) / 2 You can compare the different effects here <<a href="http://default-cube.deviantart.com/art/Text-Vert-Align-520839470" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://default-cube.deviantart.com/art/Text-Vert-Align-520839470</a>>, and see if you agree or not. -- cairo mailing list <a href="mailto:cairo@cairographics.org">cairo@cairographics.org</a> <a href="http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo</a></blockquote></div> </div>