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-1.0 was done using the GTK+ widget toolkit as a test platform. Pango forms the core of text and font handling for GTK+-2.0. Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout can be used with four different font backends: - Core X windowing system fonts - Client-side fonts on X using the Xft library - Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType library - Native fonts on Microsoft backends 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 version 2.0.0 of the GLib library; more information about GLib can be found at http://www.gtk.org/. To build optional the PangoFT2 backend you'll need the FreeType library from http://www.freetype.org. You'll need at least version 2.0.1. To build the PangoX backend, you'll need the libraries from the X window system are needed to build Pango and GTK+. You should already have these installed on your system, but it's possible that you'll need to install the development environment for these libraries that your operating system vendor provides. If you have a recent version of the XFree86 system, such as 4.2.0, then the PangoXft backend will built, which provides anti-aliased and scaleable fonts in a much more sophisticated fashion then the support for core X fonts. Notes ===== - A bug in older versions of Xft will cause random crashes with the PangoXft backend. If you want to use the Xft backend, you should have at least XFree86 4.2. - 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 when Xft version 2 is introduced. Specifying --enable-explicit-deps or --enable-static when configuring Pango will defeat this and should be avoided if possible. License ======= Pango is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL) - see the file COPYING for details. Owen Taylor otaylor@redhat.com 7 March 2002