[cairo] How should bindings deal with surfaces of unknown type?

[Torsten Schoenfeld]

On Sun, 2007-10-07 at 15:05 +0200, Torsten Schoenfeld wrote:

> when you cairo_surface_create_similar on, say, a PDF surface, you get a
> surface of type CAIRO_INTERNAL_SURFACE_TYPE_META.  But since that's
> internal, all you see is a surface of type 4096.  When language bindings
> encounter such a surface, they have little choice but to represent it as
> a generic surface.  Thus, you can't call PDF specific surface methods on
> the result of calling create_similar on a PDF surface.

This problem still persists and I still don't know how to handle it.

How do other bindings deal with this situation?  What do you do with a
surface pointer for which cairo_surface_get_type returns an internal and
thus unknown value?

-- 
Bye,
-Torsten