title: Font layouting & rendering with cairo and freetype
body: <p>I have a system that has only the freetype2 and cairo libraries available. What I want to achieve is:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>getting the glyphs for a UTF-8 text</li>
  <li>layouting the text, storing position information (by myself)</li>
  <li>getting cairo paths for each glyph for rendering</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Unfortunately the documentation doesn't really explain how it should be done, as they expect one to use a higher level library like Pango.</p>
  
  <p>What I <em>think</em> could be right is: Create a scaled font with <code>cairo_scaled_font_create</code> and then retrieve the glyphs for the text using <code>cairo_scaled_font_text_to_glyphs</code>. <code>cairo_glyph_extents</code> then gives the extents for each glyph. But how can I then get things like kerning and the advance? Also, how can I then get paths for each font?</p>
  
  <p>Are there some more resources on this topic? Are these functions the expected way to go?</p>