Hi, I think you are on the right track. I was experimenting with a Drawable area. I tried your code, but I am getting segmentation faults. :-( I'm using Gtk+2.8.11. Anyways, I will experiment with your code, and hope I can get it to go.
Alot of the problem, is the non-intuitive nature of the Gtk2 objects, somethings can be written on, and somethings are only containers. It might be smart of you to ask muppet on the gtk-perl maillist. If anyone knows, it would be him.
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
flash japh