[cairo] Observations from a newb

[Dirk Schönberger]

>> I don't quite understand that. Coming from the "Cairo draws stuff" pov
>> again:
>> images *are* stuff.
>
> Sure. And cairo has a notion of them with cairo_image_surface_t and it
> can definitely draw them. The "problem" only comes when you talk about
> the dozens of different file formats that exist for storing images and
> how to load those into a cairo_image_surface_t. That's definitely a
> big task that's outside the scope of cairo itself.
>

Oh, then I seem to miss something. I am not quite up to date with the
actual code, but I consulted the API documentation at cairographics.org.
While I found a way to render _to_ ciro image surfaces, I have found no
way to render a image surface or a RGBA buffer using cairo functionality
I.e. something like

cairo_t *cr;
cairo_matrix_t *ctx;
cairo_image_t *img;
cairo_render_image (cr, img, ctx);

Creating the cairo_image_t (or more generically a device independent
image, aka a RGBA buffer) would be left to other parties.

Regards
Dirk