Obtaining area needed to render a text

["Gustavo Cipriano Mota Sousa" <gustavocms gmail com>]

I am developing an application where I need to render some objects in a
DrawingArea, among with them are some text labels. I'd like to know in
advance how much area (width/height) would be needed to render a text. Also,
I am using cairo to render.

Anyway, thanks for the attention.