[cairo] A (LONG) Pango/Cairo Question

[Jeremy Moles]

Hello everyone! I've been somewhat active in the IRC channel lately with
various questions, so I figured I'd make a thorough post here instead of
asking each question individually.

A few months back I made a post inquiring as to how I could utilize
Pango (and Cairo) to render glyphs to an OpenGL texture. I was directed
to the Clutter project, which solved this problem by creating a custom
PangoRenderer object and providing various callbacks (particularly a
"draw_glyphs" callback) which they used to render an individual glyph,
cache it inside and OpenGL texture, and later query that when needed
again as they build and position OpenGL quads based on the information
provided to them by the Pango layout.

I've been able to dissect their code a great deal over the last two
weeks and at this point I'm quite familiar with many of the high-level
concepts needed to accomplish what I'm trying to do. I have my own "from
scratch" implementation (though highly inspired by the Clutter project)
and I'm running into a few problems.

Firstly, I want to change the origin of my cairo image surface (which is
always properly sized to be compatible with OpenGL texture requirements)
to the bottom-left corner, which will also make it's coordinate space
consistent with OpenGL. To accomplish this, I use the following code:

	cairo_matrix_t ms, mt, m;

	cairo_matrix_init_scale(&ms, 1.0f, -1.0f);
	cairo_matrix_init_translate(&mt, 0.0f, -height);
	cairo_matrix_multiply(&m, &mt, &ms);

	cairo_set_matrix(cr, &m);

I have confirmed that this works as intended as best I can, by drawing a
line from 0, 0 to 512, 512--which creates a line from the bottom-left to
the top-right of the image.

Secondly, I've hooked into the Pango API and have created my own custom
renderer class. During it's "draw_glyphs" callback, it iterates over the
list of PangoGlyph structures, creates a cairo_glyph based on this data,
and requests that Cairo draw this glyph using "cairo_show_glyphs".
However, what is currently happening is that my glyphs are getting
rendered upside-down, and I've attached a screenshot to demonstrate
this. My first question then is what else should I be doing to inform
Cairo that the glyph should be rendered properly for my case? I've tried
setting the font matrix in countless ways, but everything I do simply
causes the text to disappear.

For a bit of additional information, here is how I actually render the
glyph:
	
	pango_font_get_glyph_extents(font, glyph, &ink_rect, 0);
	pango_extents_to_pixels(&ink_rect, 0);
	cairo_set_scaled_font(cr, pango_cairo_font_get_scaled_font(...))
	// cairo_set_font_matrix(...)
	cairo_glyph.x = -ink_rect.x;
	cairo_glyph.y = -ink_rect.y;
	cairo_glyph.index = glyph;

In the above code, I'm somewhat unclear as to why I set the
cairo_glyph{x, y} values with the negative versions of the ones from the
ink_rect object queried using the Pango API; I got this part directly
from the Clutter project. This, then, leads me to my last question,
which is what are these values and how should I use them? I understand
that Cairo defines them as offsets from a 0, 0 origin, but does this
mean that Pango works with a different origin than Cairo does?

I know this is a huge e-mail, but any advice would be greatly
appreciated. :) In summation, I will explain again what I'm trying to
accomplish:

I want to use Cairo and Pango to create an accelerated OpenGL
font/texturing library (for use in OpenSceneGraph). To do this, I would
like to change my Cairo origin to the bottom left (to be consistent with
OpenGL) and begin rendering/caching glyphs from left-to-right,
bottom-to-top. Furthermore, rather than create a new surface for each
individual glyph and then copy that to the "master" texture, I would
like to use cairo_translate() and the information provided by Pango's
glyph structure to move around the texture and render the glyphs
directly. Is this possible, or am I missing some crucial concept
somewhere? :)

Thanks!
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