A function to get the effective width of the layout as it will be rendered, is useful.

It should be something like:

int
pango_layout_get_effective_width (const PangoLayout *layout)
{
  int width;

  width = pango_layout_get_width (layout);
  if (width == -1)
    pango_layout_get_size (layout, &width, NULL);
}


This is extremely useful when positioning right-to-left layouts, in Gtk+ for example.  The problem is that when doing rtl, the caller needs to know how much to offset the layout, and neither get_width, nor get_size work correctly.