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