[cairo] Drawing text

[ecir hana]

Dear list,

is it somehow possible to draw a text with cairo which loads the
character shapes from a font file (may not be installed, say just a
file "font.otf")?
And is it possible to specify the horizontal advances for each glyph,
say in an array? (In addition to implicit font metrics included in
font file.) Something like "TJ" operator in PDF [1] or "dx" attribute
of "tspan" SVG element [2].

Thanks!

[1] Document management – Portable document format, 9.4.3 Text-Showing
Operators, p. 251
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#TSpanElement