Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an emphasis on internationalization. Pango can be used anywhere that text layout is needed; however, most of the work on Pango so far has been done using the GTK+ widget toolkit as a test platform. Pango forms the core of text and font handling for GTK+-2.x. Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout can be used with different font backends. There are three basic backends, with multiple options for rendering with each. - Client side fonts using the FreeType and fontconfig libraries. Rendering can be with with Cairo or Xft libraries, or directly to an in-memory buffer with no additional libraries. - Native fonts on Microsoft Windows using Uniscribe for complex script handling. Rendering can be done via Cairo or directly using the native Win32 API. - Native fonts on MacOS X with the CoreText framework, rendering via Cairo. The integration of Pango with Cairo (http://cairographics.org) provides a complete solution with high quality text handling and graphics rendering. Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for particular combinations of script and font backend. As well as the low level layout rendering routines, Pango includes PangoLayout, a high level driver for laying out entire blocks of text, and routines to assist in editing internationalized text. For more information about Pango, see: http://www.pango.org/ Dependencies ============ Pango depends on the GLib library; more information about GLib can be found at http://www.gtk.org/. To use the Free Software stack backend, Pango depends on the following libraries: * fontconfig for font discovery (http://www.fontconfig.org), * FreeType for font access (http://www.freetype.org), * HarfBuzz for complex text shaping (http://www.harfbuzz.org/) Cairo support depends on the Cairo library (http://cairographics.org). The Cairo backend is the preferred backend to use Pango with and is subject of most of the development in the future. It has the advantage that the same code can be used for display and printing. We suggest using Pango with Cairo as described above, but you can also do X-specific rendering using the Xft library. The Xft backend uses version 2 of the Xft library to manage client side fonts. Version 2 of Xft is available from http://xlibs.freedesktop.org/release/. You'll need the libXft package, and possibly the libXrender and renderext packages as well. You'll also need fontconfig (see below.) Installation of Pango on Win32 is possible, but is not documented here. See http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html Notes ===== - By default, Pango tries to build itself so that no explicit dependency on Xft or FreeType will be introduced in apps that link to Pango. This is to avoid compatibility problems with changes in the Xft or FreeType API's or ABI's. Specifying --enable-explicit-deps or --enable-static when configuring Pango will defeat this and should be avoided if possible. License ======= Most of the code of Pango is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL) - see the file COPYING for details. The OpenType code in pango/opentype is derived from the FreeType project (http://www.freetype.org) and is dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License and the FreeType license. See see pango/opentype/FT-license.txt for full details of the FreeType license. Note that binary distributions of Pango must include a disclaimer that the software is based in part of the work of the FreeType Team, in the distribution documentation; for instance, by including this README file. Owen Taylor otaylor@redhat.com Behdad Esfahbod behdad@gnome.org 20 August 2012
