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.

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.

Installation of Pango on Win32 is possible, see README.win32.

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.