About Pango
===========
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, though most usage so far as been in the context of the GTK+ widget toolkit. Pango forms the core of text and font handling for GTK+ 2.
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 Xft2 library
- Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType library
- Native fonts on Microsoft platforms
Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for particular combinations of script and font backend. Pango-1.8.0 ships with a wide selection of modules, including modules for Hebrew, Arabic, Hangul, and a number of Indic and South-East Asian scripts. Virtually all of the world's major scripts are supported.
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.
More information about Pango is available from
http://www.pango.org/.
Pango depends on version 2.6.0 or better of the GLib library; more
information about GLib can be found at
http://www.gtk.org/.
Overview of changes between 1.8.1 and 1.8.2
===========================================
* Add Khmer support [Jens Herden, Javier Sola]
* Fix bugs and crashes in the operation of PangoLayoutIter [Amit Aronovitch
]
* Increase sharing of data between different copies of Pango
[Tommi Komulainen, Ross Burton]
* Remove dependence of opentype code on FreeType internals [David Turner,
Behdad Esfahbod]
* Cache metrics for the Win32 backend [Tor Lillqvist]
* Improve handling of RTL text when passing it to Uniscribe [Tor]
* Support for TrueType fonts on Win32 with characters outside the BMP [Tor]
* Handle alpha in XftColors again. [Mikael Magnusson]
* Better handling of MacThai encoded fonts [Theppitak Karoonboonyanan]
* Handle zero width chars properly in Hangul backend
[Young-Ho Cha, Changwoo Ryu]
* Fix Oriya character classification [Gora Mohanty, Gautam Sengupta]
* PangoAttrIterator bug fixes [Morten Welinder]
* Clean up copyright/licensing information [William N. Ray]
* Misc bug and build fixes [Sebastien Bacher, Brandon Bergren,
Chris Blizzard, Paolo Borelli, Behdad, Harshula, Alex Jones, Aivars Kalva
ns,
Stepan Kasal, Karel Kulhavy, Ryan Lortie, Ben Maurer, Sukhjinder Sidhu,
Manish Singh, Emil Soleyman-Zomalan, Morten]
Owen Taylor
26 July 2005
