How to shift a Cairo drawing/surface

Question

I am trying to write a gtk + Cairo application that mimics the animation in wikipedias sine graph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Circle_cos_sin.gif

I want to draw a point and then shift the surface to the left, and then draw a new point, and shift again. I have done this with pixmaps, but I cant figure it out with Cairo.

Is offset the way to go?

cairo_surface_set_device_offset (surface, offset_x, offset_y);

Answer 1

Cairo does not allow to copy a surface to itself. Thus, I would recommend to draw your image to a cairo image surface and then draw that one to your target surface at different offsets.