The Pango backends written for Win32 is pangowin32. Pangowin32 uses the Win32 GDI font API. GTK+ 2.8 and later on Win32 however actually uses the pangocairo backend (which then uses only small parts of pangowin32). Much of the GDI font API calls are in cairo. The pangoft2 backend was originally written with Win32 in mind, but its main use nowadays is on other platforms than Win32. There are three ways to build Pango for Win32: 1) Use gcc (mingw), libtool, make, like on Unix. If building from git, run the autogen.sh script that runs aclocal, automake, autoconf and configure to build makefiles etc. This is what tml@novell.com uses. Pass the same switches to autogen.sh that you would pass to the configure script. If building from a tarball, just running the configure script and then make should be enough. But, as always, you need to understand what is happening and follow the progress in case manual intervention is needed. tml ran the configure script like this when building binaries for Pango 1.10.0: PATH=/devel/dist/glib-2.8.0/bin:$PATH ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /devel/dist/glib-2.8.0/share/aclocal" PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/devel/dist/glib-2.8.0/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH CC='gcc -mtune=pentium3' CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/gnu/include' LDFLAGS='-L/opt/gnu/lib' CFLAGS=-O ./configure --disable-gtk-doc --without-x --prefix=c:/devel/target/pango-1.10.0 2) Use Visual Studio 2008 or later (Express/Community or above). Use the solution file in build/win32/vsX, where X corresponds to the numerical version of your Visual Studio, such as 9 for 2008 and 12 for 2013. See the README.txt there for more information, or see the following GNOME Live! page for a more detailed description of building Pango and its dependencies with Visual Studio: https://live.gnome.org/GTK%2B/Win32/MSVCCompilationOfGTKStack 3) Use MSVC and nmake. Use the makefile.msc makefiles. These makefiles are supported by Hans Breuer. They requires manual editing. You need to have the source code to some suitable version of glib in a sibling directory. Ask Hans for advice.