Drawing with pycairo

Cairo paints paths with solid colours, gradients, mesh gradients and images, and composites them with 20-odd operators. It writes PNG, PDF, SVG and PostScript. It does not shape text, filter pixels, combine paths, outline strokes, or do depth. scripts/cairokit.py fills each gap; scripts/selftest.py exercises all of it. Both were verified on pycairo 1.29.1 / cairo 1.18.0 / Python 3.11.

Setup

pip install --break-system-packages pycairo numpy uharfbuzz fonttools skia-pathops
python3 /mnt/skills/user/drawing-with-pycairo/scripts/selftest.py /tmp/cairo-selftest

The self-test prints the cairo version, whether Pango is usable, per-panel timings, and the path of a 2×2 contact sheet. Read that sheet: panel A shows joined Arabic in green next to broken toy-API Arabic in red, B shows four boolean results and an outlined wave, C shows glow and a soft shadow, D shows a smooth-shaded torus. Then:

import sys; sys.path.insert(0, "/mnt/skills/user/drawing-with-pycairo/scripts")
from cairokit import *

In the environment where this was built, pycairo was not preinstalled. Pango was also absent: the system PyGObject was compiled for Python 3.12 while python3 was 3.11, and there were no Pango typelibs. pango() reports which case you are in.