Pango

Infobox Software
name = Pango
developer = Behdad Esfahbod


caption = Pango name written as intended
operating_system = Unix-like
genre = Text rendering
license = LGPL
website = [http://www.pango.org/ www.pango.org]

Pango (Παν語) is a free and open source computing library for rendering internationalized texts in high quality. Different font backends can be used, allowing cross-platform support.

Utilization

Pango has been integrated into most Linux distributions. It most notably provides the rendering for text in the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird mail client in Fedora Core 6 amongst others. Special permission was granted by the Mozilla Corporation as Pango has so far not been included in the Mozilla source code.cite web | author = Fedora Project | title = "Fedora Core 6 Release Notes" | url = http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/RELEASE-NOTES-en_US.html#id321398 | accessdate = 2007-03-09] Similarly, Debian's Iceweasel, IceDove and IceApe use Pango.

Name

The name pango is from Greek "pan" (παν, "all") and Japanese "go" (語, "language"). It can also be connected with Latin "pango" ("I fasten") and Māori "pango" ("black").

Support for OpenType features

Pango 1.17 and newer support the locl script tag that allows alternate glyphs to be used for the same Unicode code point. Assuming you have Verdana version 5.01 installed, which supports the locl feature for the latn/ROM (Romanian) script, a quick demonstration (on Linux) is:for lang in en ro; do pango-view --font="Verdana 64" --text "şţ vs. șț in $lang" --language=$lang& done

For an explanation of the substitutions rules for Romanian, see this discussion.

Setting the locale via the POSIX environment variable, e.g. LANG=ro_RO.UTF-8 will also cause Pango to use locl font features. Finally, you can change the language on the fly in the same text using [http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/PangoMarkupFormat.html Pango markup] , e.g.:

pango-view --font="Verdana 24" --markup --text 'In the same text: şţ(en) and şţ(ro).'

The official showcase of Pango's script-aware features is [http://www.pango.org/ScriptGallery here] .

Text and graphics

Complete text handling and graphics rendering is provided when integrated with Cairo.

Future direction

HarfBuzz will unify Pango and the internal Qt font library, both of which originate in FreeType 1.x.

See also

*Uniscribe (Windows multilingual text rendering engine)
*WorldScript (Old Macintosh multilingual text rendering engine)
*Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (New Macintosh multilingual text rendering engine)
*Graphite (multiplatform open source renderer from SIL)
*Cairo a vector-based graphics library with multiple backends

References

External links

* [http://www.pango.org/ Pango website]
* [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-u-pango1/ Pango introduction]