ink size of glyph

["jim Pharis" <binbrain gmail com>]

I have strings of various languages stored in a database. I can print the
strings in my cairo widget no problem. However, I need to figure out what
the ink size of the glyph is because different characters are taking up
different amounts of space. That is, I need to know how many pixels the
character takes up when it is renedered to screen. Someone on IRC mentioned
to use Pango for this but I'm not making heads or tails of how I might
accomplish this using Pango. An example would be excellent.

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- Jim Pharis