The cairo:surface-t structure represents an image, either as the destination of a drawing operation or as source when drawing onto another surface. To draw to a cairo:surface-t instance, create a Cairo context with the surface as the target, using the cairo:create function.

There are different subtypes of a cairo:surface-t structure for different drawing backends. For example, the cairo:image-surface-create function creates a bitmap image in memory. The type of a surface can be queried with the cairo:surface-type function.

The initial contents of a surface after creation depend upon the manner of its creation. If Cairo creates the surface and backing storage for the user, it will be initially cleared, for example, the cairo:image-surface-create and cairo:surface-create-similar functions. Alternatively, if the user passes in a reference to some backing storage and asks Cairo to wrap that in a cairo:surface-t structure, then the contents are not modified, for example, the cairo:image-surface-create-for-data function.

Memory management of a cairo:surface-t structure is done with the cairo:surface-reference and cairo:surface-destroy functions.