Drawing text to local memory pixmap with Pango

[Daniel Werner <dwerner experimentalscene com>]

Hi, this is my first post to this list, hello :)

I am writing a GPL 3D engine / GUI toolkit that composes all graphics in 
local memory before sending the entire window (or the rectangle that was 
updated) to X. This has proved reasonably efficient due to to X's shared 
memory extension (I share the pixmap backing each window with x, 
otherwise all widgets etc use their own local memory pixmaps). Now it's 
time to start drawing text, and it seems Pango is the way to go. I only 
want to render to offscreen, non-X11 memory that is allocated by my 
toolkit. My problem is that I can't get any good information from web 
searches on how to use Pango this way. I saw an example where someone 
used GTK to render the text via Pango, and then read the bitmap pixels 
into memory and made quads out of this, an inneficient solution, plus I 
don't want to use GTK, just Pango. Can anyone point me in the right 
direction?

Cheers,
Daniel Werner
http://www.experimentalscene.com/