pango layout in irregular (non-rectangular) bounding shape

[august <august alien mur at>]

hey y'all,

	 I'm just getting started with cairo and pango and trying to figure
	 out how to render text within a non-rectangular bounding shape?   I
	 can already render stuff to screen and bound a text segment by width
	 and height....but still haven't figgered out how to translate it by
	 x,y.   In addition, I'd like to render text inside a polygon shape. 

	 Can someone point me in the right direction?  I've been reading the
	 mailinglist archives and looking at the online api reference trying
	 to figure this out.  I've also started to inspect the Inkscape code
	 to see how they do it....but can't yet see where.

	 Do I need to iterate through the text segment, character by
	 character, and draw each glyph to screen, measuring it's x and y?
	 Is that slow?  

	 Any help or pointers would be much appreciated.

	 many thanks -august.