I don't really know my way around cairo-script, so bear with me.

First, to test your script with the xlib backend:

diff --git a/util/cairo-script/csi-replay.c b/util/cairo-script/csi-replay.c
index 4c66b7752..e25e6fc63 100644
--- a/util/cairo-script/csi-replay.c
+++ b/util/cairo-script/csi-replay.c
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@
 #include <stdio.h>
 #include <stdlib.h>
 #include <string.h>
+#include <unistd.h>
 
 static const cairo_user_data_key_t _key;
 
@@ -119,6 +120,7 @@ static void
 _destroy_window (void *closure)
 {
     XFlush (_get_display ());
+    sleep(3);
     XDestroyWindow (_get_display(), (Window) closure);
 }
 

Then, let's take a look at your script (could you provide a self-contained C program instead if the following is not what you want to hear?):

    %!CairoScript
    << /content //COLOR_ALPHA /width 460 /height 345 /fallback-resolution
[100 100] >> surface context
    1 g set-source
    paint

The above creates a surface of size 460x345, creates a context for it, sets the source to all white (1 g is apparently r=g=b) and paints it, i.e. this fills the surface with white.

    //ALPHA [] record
    dup /s6 exch def dup context

Uhm... I'm not quite sure. I guess this creates another cairo context for the same surface?

    [12 0 0 12 0 0] set-font-matrix
    << /type 42 /index 0 /flags 32 /source < ... > >> font dup /f0 exch def
set-font-face /scaled-font get /sf0 exch def
    [0 7 <~6i~>] show-glyphs

Font setup and draw some glyph somewhere.

    pop pattern

Turn the surface that is on the stack into a surface pattern.

    [1 0 0 1 -227.4 -9.312] set-matrix
    set-source

Set this pattern as the source with the above matrix (just some offset).

    paint
    pop

Draw the cairo surface. Is this a self-copy (drawing a surface to itself)? If so, that's not allowed in cairo.

I'll try to provide a minimal C example but that's not easy -- this is in the context of a cairo backend (https://github.com/anntzer/mplcairo) for Matplotlib (a Python plotting library) so it's layers and layers of Python driving a C library.  In the meantime...

    //ALPHA [] record
    dup /s6 exch def dup context

Looking at cairo-script-surface.c, one sees that this is written by _emit_recording_pattern_surface and attach_snapshot, with the contents of the recording surface in the next lines.

Both from my own code and from my interpretation of the script I believe that I am not drawing a surface to itself.

Created attachment 136417 [details]
minimal example reproducing the issue.

I managed to find a self-contained way to reproduce the issue, as documented in the attached source.

Compile and run with
  $ gcc main.c -g $(pkg-config --cflags cairo-ft) $(pkg-config --libs cairo-ft) -o main
  $ ./main
Inspect the contents of /tmp/test.png, /tmp/test1.png, /tmp/test.svg,
/tmp/test1.svg.  Only the last one is missing text (this is the
bug). cairo-script output is also generated (for reference) to
/tmp/test{,1}.script.

The program writes "hello world" to an image, an SVG and a script surface,
either directly, or via a recording surface used as pattern.

My investigations indicate that for the issue to appear, it is necessary
that
1. the recording surface is unbounded, and
2. the recording surface has content type CAIRO_CONTENT_ALPHA.

Oh, sorry for misinterpreting your script.

I don't have much clue about SVGs either, but on cairo git/master, the test1.svg actually does contain some drawing, but it is just not visible. (With debian's libcairo2 1.15.8-3 the SVG looks quite empty in a text editor.) To make that drawing visible, it is enough to get rid of the "just use the alpha component"-filter. Specifically replacing

   <g id="surface5" clip-path="url(#clip1)" filter="url(#alpha)">

in test1.svg with

   <g id="surface5" clip-path="url(#clip1)">

makes the text visible. (The "clip1" reference seems to point into nowhere, by the way, there is no such path in the file, I think.)

I'll leave the details of what this means to someone with some knowledge about SVGs. Perhaps chromium just does not support this filter correctly?

In the meantime, I'll modify your example for cairo-xcb / cairo-xlib and investigate what is going on there.

Actually... what are the semantics of drawing an alpha-only surface to a color-only target with operator OVER? I'm not quite sure and this seems to be the root of the problem. https://www.cairographics.org/operators/ doesn't answer this either.

I noticed that with cairo-xcb the example program works, while with cairo-xlib still nothing is displayed. After staring at protocol traces for far too long, I noticed that the significant difference seems to be in the drawing to the intermediate surface:

cairo-xlib:
- creates an uninitialized(???) intermediate pixmap
- draws the glyphs to it via operator OVER
- with a black solid source

cairo-xcb:
- creates an intermediate pixmap and clears it
- draws the glyphs to it via operator ADD
- with a white solid source

Both backends then OVER this intermediate to the target picture which uses a RGB24 format. I'm not actually sure why this produces no result with cairo-xlib, but the missing clearing of the intermediate pixmap strikes me as quite odd.

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