I'm writing a desktop manager which uses GDK, and there are some things I can't figure out how to do, even after looking through the official documentation and tutorials. Does anyone know how to:

Draw outlines on the letters in a Pango layout? (like desktop icon text in KDE)

Shade selected icons? (like in a GtkIconView - I've tried various drawing modes with pixbufs and rectangles drawn on top, but can't get anything to look right)

Receive events from a GDK window? (I've tried to set an events mask and connect signal handlers to the root window, but when I start the program I get messages saying that the expose_event/button-press signals are invalid for the object. This even happens when I create a new GDK window, with the event mask set in the constructor)

Thanks.