[gtkmm] DrawingArea Buffer

[Gregory P Bayard Dartmouth EDU (Gregory P. Bayard)]

My question concerns buffering a drawing area.  If I draw directly to a GDK window the screen flickers badly.  This is clearly becuase I clear to white and then draw all of the objects over the white.  To solve this problem I created a pixmap as the window's background.  This solution works, but performance is sub par.  Via word of mouth, I heard that Drawing Areas are buffered by default and that there is a way to simply draw to the GDK window without updating the screen.  Then after everything is drawn, you tell the window to update the screen.  Is this true? How is this implimented? Are there any examples?

Gregory Bayard