Pango

Pango is a library for laying out and rendering of text, with an emphasis on internationalization. Pango can be used anywhere that text layout is needed, though most of the work on Pango so far has been done in the context of the GTK widget toolkit. Pango forms the core of text and font handling for GTK.

The name comes from the Greek Παν (“Pan”), meaning “all”, and the Japanese 語 (“Go”), meaning “language”.

Features

Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout engine 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 Cairo or Xft libraries, or directly to an in-memory buffer with no additional libraries.
• Native fonts on Microsoft Windows. Rendering can be done via Cairo or directly using the native Win32 API.
• Native fonts on MacOS X, rendering via Cairo.

As well as the low-level layout rendering routines, Pango includesPangoLayout, a high-level driver for laying out entire blocks of text, and routines to assist in editing internationalized text.