[cairo] Always keep text in foreground?

[Daniel Goldman]

Hi, 

I make the path for polygon A, stroke it, fill with red, and apply "Long Label 
A"  using pango. Next, I stroke polygon B, fill with blue, and apply "Label B". 
Everything is  great, expect the polygon B fill overlaps and hides part of "Long 
Label A" text. 


----------------------- 
| Long Label A        | 
|         |   Label B | 
----------------------- 
     A         B 

How do I always keep the text in the z-order foreground? I already know about 
decreasing  font size and making the labels appear on multiple lines to prevent 
overlaps. I'm looking for something to use when overlap cannot be prevented. I 
tried using alpha channel, so the label can show through, but  I lose too much 
intensity for both text and fill colors. 


In other words, is there a way to tell cairo / pango "I want this text to always 
be  foreground", or "I want this fill to always be background".

If not, is it possible (or advisable) to write the polygons to one context (I 
guess), write the text to another context (or whatever), and then overlay the 
text over the polygons? If this is feasible, could someone sketch out the key 
functions to use.

Perhaps I will end up doing all the polygons first, and then doing all the 
labels. It's just  inconvenient, since I get all the data for one polygon, its 
label and the label  positioning, then get all the data for the next polygon, 
etc. 


I'm not saying the default behavior (fill overlays previous text) is wrong. I'm 
just hoping I can override it. I looked  through the cairo and pango docs and 
past postings and couldn't find the answer. 


Thanks, 
Daniel