Pango-Cairo graphics - is this as good as it gets?

[Mike Birch <Mike ImmortalSoFar com>]

http://immortalsofar.com/PangoDemo/PangoImage.jpg

I've left the demo code (main.c) in the PangoDemo folder as a small demonstration but rendering graphics as glyphs restricts them to the equivalent of CSS's "display: inline" and I can't find anything in the Pango source to give much flexibility here. Am I overlooking something?

Being able to render Pango to a region (leaving holes for images) would be a good start, modifying that region as part of the rendering would be even better.

Mike.