Re: Non-ascii characters break Cairo's show_text

[Torsten Schoenfeld <kaffeetisch gmx de>]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 21:42 +0300, Ari Jolma wrote:
> I can't get non-ascii characters to print on an image surface with 
> Cairo. Furthermore, a show_text call with non-ascii character seems to 
> break text rendering for subsequent ascii text also. I wonder what's the 
> problem.

Sounds a lot like the issue that comes up rather often on the cairo
list.  For example:
<http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2007-June/010858.html>

See <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2007-June/010859.html>
and replies for an explanation of what's going on.

In short: show_text() is considered only a "toy" API.  For example, it
uses the specified font and nothing else.  So if that font doesn't have
the glyph you're trying to render, it won't work.  No font merging is
done.  The answer is usually to use pango for any non-trivial text
rendering.

-- 
Bye,
-Torsten