Cairo PDF - text vs. curves

When I started to use Cairo, I was at first surprised and then pleased by finding out that the text in PDF export was converted into curves. However, later I found that cairo also supports normal text and embedding of fonts in PDF. Because both can be useful in different situations, I would like to show in this post how both can be achieved in PyCairo (the Cairo bindings to Python).
The basic difference is in the PyCairo context object method you use to create the text. The two possibilities are:

• show_text(text)
• text_path(text)

The first one puts a normal text into the drawing (and embeds fonts), while the second creates a path for the text, which can later be filled (or stroked), thus converting the text into curves.
The following code demonstrates this feature:

import cairo
width, height = 200, 100
# create the surface and context
surface = cairo.PDFSurface( "output.pdf", width, height)
context = cairo.Context( surface)
# white background
context.set_source_rgb( 1, 1, 1)
context.rectangle( 0, 0, width, height)
context.fill()
# draw the text
context.set_font_size( 32)
context.select_font_face( "Arial")
context.move_to( 10, 40)
context.set_source_rgb( 0, 0, 0.5)
# text as curves
context.text_path( "Hello curves")
context.fill()
context.move_to( 30, 80)
# text as text
context.show_text( "Hello text")
# finalization
context.show_page()
surface.finish()

When you run this code, you will get a small PDF document called output.pdf in which part of the text will be selectable as normal text and part will not, because it is converted to curves.
As mentioned, the text path can be also used for stroking, which will produce a nice text outline:

Cairo and EPS format - a short detective story

The cairo library is a great tool that allows generation of hi-quality graphics in both bitmap (PNG) and vector (PDF, EPS, SVG) formats. It is multi-platform and has bindings into several scripting languages, including Python. For this reason I use it for export both in OASA and BKChem.
In this post I would like to show one feature of Cairo that recently backfired on me - fallback rendering.

As was reported by several users, the BKChem EPS export via Cairo was not what it was expected to be - it was a bitmap rendering of the drawing embedded into an EPS. I tried to find out what is going on and after much googling I quite unexpectedly found a clue in the source of the EPS file - one magical word "fallback". I googled "fallback" in relation to cairo and found these release notes mentioning that the PostScript export uses fallback rendering in case translucency is used.
This led back to discovery that BKChem cairo export inserts some invisible (completely transparent) rectangles into the drawing (these are used internally in BKChem for text borders) and these are causing the fall back to bitmap rendering (even though they are invisible in the output). By removing these from the export, I was able to make the EPS export work properly. It will be part of the next BKChem release.

As always, I hope that this post would be useful to other people possibly struggling with the same problem.
The lesson is clear - Watch out for invisible rectangles :)