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- 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 different font backends. There are three basic backends, with
- multiple options for rendering with each.
-
- - Client side fonts using the FreeType and fontconfig libraries.
- Rendering can be with with Cairo or Xft libraries, or directly
- to an in-memory buffer with no additional libraries.
-
- - Native fonts on Microsoft Windows using Uniscribe if available for
- complex script handling. Rendering can be done via Cairo or
- directly using the native Win32 API.
-
- - Native fonts on MacOS X, rendering via Cairo.
-
- The integration of Pango with Cairo (http://cairographics.org)
- provides a complete solution with high quality text handling
- and graphics rendering.
-
- 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 the GLib library; more information about GLib can
- be found at http://www.gtk.org/.
-
- When using client side fonts, 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.
-
- Cairo support depends on the Cairo library (http://cairographics.org).
- The Cairo backend is the preferred backend to use Pango with and is
- subject of most of the development in the future. It has the
- advantage that the same code can be used for display and printing.
-
- We suggest using Pango with Cairo as described above, but you can also
- do X-specific rendering using the Xft library. The Xft backend uses
- version 2 of the Xft library to manage client side fonts. Version 2 of
- Xft is available from http://xlibs.freedesktop.org/release/. You'll
- need the libXft package, and possibly the libXrender and renderext
- packages as well. You'll also need fontconfig (see below.)
-
- Installation of Pango on Win32 is possible, but is not documented
- here. See http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/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 General 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
-
- Behdad Esfahbod
- behdad@gnome.org
-
- 26 February 2007
-