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/.

The recommended font backend for X in Pango-1.2 is the Xft backend
which uses version 2 of the Xft library to manage client
side fonts. Benefits of the Xft backend include, performance,
support for OpenType fonts, and antialiasing. Version 2 of
Xft is available from http://keithp.com/fonts/. The 'fcpackage'
tarball includes both Xft, and it's dependency, 'fontconfig'.
(see below.)

Note that an earlier version of Xft is shipped with version
of XFree86 up to 4.2. This version does not work with Pango-1.2;
Pango-1.2 requires version 2 of Xft.

Both Xft and the optional PangoFT2 backend look up fonts via
the fontconfig library, available along with Xft in the
'fcpackage' tarball from http://keithp.com/fonts. They
also require at least version 2.0.1 of the FreeType
library. (http://www.freetype.org)

There is also a backend that uses core X protocol fonts. This
backend only requires the standard libraries from the X window 
system. 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.

Installation of Pango on Win32 is possible, but is not documented
here. See http://www.gimp.org/~tml/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
=======

Pango is licensed under the terms of the 
GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL) - see the file
COPYING for details.

Owen Taylor
otaylor@redhat.com
8 August 2002