Hello World in pycairo

Cairo is a portable 2D graphics library for drawing to PDF, PNG, SVG, X11, Windows, etc. Here is a minimal example (hello world) to create a PNG with text on a solid background written in pycairo (Cairo for Python).

import cairo # import the Python module

# setup a place to draw
surface = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, 400, 200)
ctx = cairo.Context (surface)

# paint background
ctx.set_source_rgb(0.22, 0.08, 0.69) # blue
ctx.rectangle(0, 0, 400, 200)
ctx.fill()

# draw text
ctx.select_font_face('Sans')
ctx.set_font_size(60) # em-square height is 90 pixels
ctx.move_to(10, 90) # move to point (x, y) = (10, 90)
ctx.set_source_rgb(1.00, 0.83, 0.00) # yellow
ctx.show_text('Hello World')

# finish up
ctx.stroke() # commit to surface
surface.write_to_png('hello_world.png') # write to file

This code was tested with PyCairo 1.8, Cairo 1.10, Python 2.7, and Fedora 14, but it should work on a variety of systems.

For more, see Cairo samples.