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 three different font backends: - Client-side fonts on X using the Xft library - Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType library - Native fonts on Microsoft backends (There is also a core-X font backend still present in the code; usage of this backend is deprecated.) 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 2.6.0 or new of the GLib library; more information about GLib can be found at http://www.gtk.org/. The supported font backend for X in Pango-1.8 is the Xft backend which uses version 2 of the Xft library to manage client side fonts. Version 2 of Xft is available from http://fontconfig.org/ Along with Xft, you'll need to install its dependency fontconfig, and possibly also the Xrender library, if that doesn't come with your system. Both of these libraries are available from the same place as fontconfig. Note that an earlier version of Xft is shipped with version of XFree86 up to 4.2. This version does not work with Pango-1.8; Pango-1.8 requires version 2 of Xft, which is present in XFree86-4.3 and newer and in X11R6.7 and X11R6.8. Both Xft and the optional PangoFT2 backend require the fontconfig library (http://www.fontconfig.org) to look up fonts. At least version 2.0.9 of the FreeType font handling library (http://www.freetype.org) is also required. If fontconfig and FreeType are not found at configure time, or FreeType is too old, then neither the Xft nor the FT2 backend is will be built. After installing fontconfig, it may be necessary to edit the fonts.conf file, found at $(sysconfdir)/fonts/fonts.conf (usually /etc/fonts/fonts.conf) to point at the fonts on your system. 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 ======= 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 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 15 December 2004