[Haskell-cafe] Drawing an existing image into a cairo surface?

[Rafal Kolanski]

I finally came up with a solution that suits my context. For those 
interested, I'm supplying it here.

Safely get a surface containing your .png image (note that the surface 
has to be freed when you're done with it using surfaceFinish)

imageSurfaceCreateFromPNG :: FilePath -> IO Surface
imageSurfaceCreateFromPNG file =
     withImageSurfaceFromPNG file $ \png -> do
         w <- renderWith png $ imageSurfaceGetWidth png
         h <- renderWith png $ imageSurfaceGetHeight png
         surf <- createImageSurface FormatRGB24 w h
         renderWith surf $ do
             setSourceSurface png 0 0
             paint
         return surf

Now the unsafe part (hack until I have an associative list storing my 
images to pull into relevant pages for rendering):

unsafeLoadPNG file = unsafePerformIO $ imageSurfaceCreateFromPNG file

This allows drawing an image directly in a Render () context:

paintImage :: FilePath -> Double -> Double -> Render ()
paintImage file x y = do
     surf <- return $ unsafeLoadPNG file
     setSourceSurface surf x y
     paint

Looking at this irc log from 2005:
   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/irc-logs/05.11.20
someone's had this problem before, and although they did not show their 
solution, I think it might've been similar to mine.

Hope this helps the next person to get stuck.

Sincerely,

Rafal Kolanski.