[cairo] Basic cairomm questions

[Ian Britten]

Hi all,
I'm new to Cairo (Looks pretty good though!), and had a couple of
(basic) questions, mostly related to cairomm (And PDF, since
that's where I'm starting).

- Is this an appropriate place for cairomm questions?  I found the
   documentation for it
   (http://www.cairographics.org/documentation/cairomm/reference/)
   but couldn't seem to find any sort of project page for it.

- What's the relationship between cairo and cairomm (Other than
   the obvious C++ wrapping)?  Is it maintained by the same people
   at the same time as cairo, or is it some sort of unofficial
   add-on, which might be lagging behind, abandoned someday, etc?
   [ Asked another way I guess - If I'm a C++ developer, why
     *wouldn't* I use cairomm?  What long-term risk/concern would
     I introduce to my project by using it? ]

- If cairo and cairomm are "together":
   - Should there be a link somewhere from the Cairo page to the
     cairomm docs (at least).  Sorry if I overlooked it.
   - Are they sync'd/released together, or do they maintain their
     own independent version numbers?

- What strategy does cairo(mm) use for error handling?  As a
   specific example, if an invalid path/filename is passed to
   the PdfSurface constructor (such that it can't create the
   requested file), how to I know that?  Exceptions?  Error
   numbers somewhere (Like errno)?  Inference? (ie: I get a NULL
   back, and guess what the problem might have been)  Other?

- As a graphics library, I realize encodings and Unicode aren't
   really a big concern to Cairo, but is there any definitive
   approach to this?  Again, using the filename passed to the
   PdfSurface constructor, what encoding/codepage is that
   expected to be in?  Current runtime?  UTF8?  ISO-8859-1?
   [ All our text handling is in Unicode, so I'll need to
     address this issue anywhere I'm interfacing with relevant
     Cairo code. ]

Well, thanks for any info.  Keep up the great work!
Ian