Description A recording surface is a surface that records all drawing operations at the highest level of the surface backend interface, (that is, the level of paint, mask, stroke, fill, and show_text_glyphs). The recording surface can then be "replayed" against any target surface by using it as a source surface. If you want to replay a surface so that the results in target will be identical to the results that would have been obtained if the original operations applied to the recording surface had instead been applied to the target surface, you can use code like this: A recording surface is logically unbounded, i.e. it has no implicit constraint on the size of the drawing surface. However, in practice this is rarely useful as you wish to replay against a particular target surface with known bounds. For this case, it is more efficient to specify the target extents to the recording surface upon creation. The recording phase of the recording surface is careful to snapshot all necessary objects (paths, patterns, etc.), in order to achieve accurate replay. The efficiency of the recording surface could be improved by improving the implementation of snapshot for the various objects. For example, it would be nice to have a copy-on-write implementation for _cairo_surface_snapshot.