Pango font metrics

["Boncek, John" <jboncek Hunter COM>]

I have some simple Pango code working, using layouts and
pango_font_description_from_string to display some multi-line text in
several fonts.  How can I find out or compute the total height (in pixels)
of one row of text for a given font, including both the actual text height
and the space between rows (sometimes called leading)?  The code I am
converting to Pango also wants to know a maximum character width for a
given font -- is that even a meaningful question in Pango?

Thanks for your attention.