the cairo designers call the "toy" text API. It is convenient for short demos and simple programs, but it is not expected to be adequate for serious text-using applications.
Selects a family and style of font from a simplified description as a family name, slant and weight. Cairo provides no operation to list available family names on the system (this is a "toy", remember), but the standard CSS2 generic family names, ("serif", "sans-serif", "cursive", "fantasy", "monospace"), are likely to work as expected.
If family starts with the string "cairo:", or if no native font backends are compiled in, cairo will use an internal font family. The internal font family recognizes many modifiers in the family string, most notably, it recognizes the string "monospace". That is, the family name "cairo:monospace" will use the monospace version of the internal font family.
For "real" font selection, see the font-backend-specific font_face_create functions for the font backend you are using. (For example, if you are using the freetype-based cairo-ft font backend, see cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face() or cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_pattern().) The resulting font face could then be used with [cairo.global.scaledFontCreate] and [cairo.context.Context.setScaledFont].
Similarly, when using the "real" font support, you can call directly into the underlying font system, (such as fontconfig or freetype), for operations such as listing available fonts, etc.
It is expected that most applications will need to use a more comprehensive font handling and text layout library, (for example, pango), in conjunction with cairo.
If text is drawn without a call to [cairo.context.Context.selectFontFace], (nor [cairo.context.Context.setFontFace] nor [cairo.context.Context.setScaledFont]), the default family is platform-specific, but is essentially "sans-serif". Default slant is [cairo.types.FontSlant.Normal], and default weight is [cairo.types.FontWeight.Normal].
This function is equivalent to a call to [cairo.global.toyFontFaceCreate] followed by [cairo.context.Context.setFontFace].
Parameters
family | a font family name, encoded in UTF-8 |
slant | the slant for the font |
weight | the weight for the font |