This was my original thought but Matthias and others suggested this. One of the issues with cairo is that we would have to either run through the drawing commands on every expose event or save out to a bitmaps surface which would remove the ability to zoom. The other option is to recreate evince in gtk+. That is not going to happen.
Or convince Carl to make the "meta" surface a public API before 1.2 hits the streets, and make whatever improvements are necessary for that to happen. That's essentially what GnomePrint does, anyway. Best, Dom -- Counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums.