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 2.4.0 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-1.4 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-1.4;
Pango-1.4 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
13 September 2004