Text Animation since gdk_draw_text

["Nix N. Nix" <nix go-nix ca>]

Hi!

My question is rather generic:  What's the best way to animate a piece
of text with GDK/Pango and all the functions required when replacing the
deprecated gdk_draw_text ?

So far, with gdk_draw_text, having text, say, follow the mouse cursor
was a simple matter of XORing the text at the old location to make it
disappear, then XORing the text at the new location to make it appear.

With the recommended replacement for gdk_draw_text as outlined in GTK+
Common Question # 1.11, this list (Owen Taylor, in particular, IIRC) has
brought to my attention that, since Pango renders text in a much more
sophisticated fashion, it renders XOR meaningless.

Since, for my application, I don't much care about, say, antialiasing, I
was wondering if there was a way to turn that off by maybe modifying the
PangoContext or the PangoLayout or the PangoFontDescription or
/something/.  Now, if doing this does not cause XOR to once more be
honoured, I still would like to know.

If there's no way to XOR text onto a drawing area, is there any other
way to animate text aside from rendering it onto an off-screen bitmap
and then animating a (possibly huge) bitmap ?

Thanks for any help you can offer !