I just came up with one of my best algorithms in about 2 years. The speedup and memory savings are possibly optimal. I should have a demo early this week, but I'm so excited that I just had to share. It's basically 5 mem copies per label background. The one-and-only, per-person background pixbuf grows to max-width and max-height as necessary. Since the corners never change, there's just four border copies and one middle section copy. No scaling, no Cairo, no extra memory, and no unnecessary memory creation/destruction. Just pixel-pushin' speed. And I get copy-and-paste for free. After that, it will be time to see about creating an entire read-only GtkTextView/GtkTextBuffer that could be exported as a document of a user's chosen format.