What is Pango?
Pango is open source software that seeks to create a software framework so that international text characters can be electronically rendered. Though most of those who speak English may not realize it, many languages are not represented or are underrepresented on the Internet and in other software applications. Mostly, that is due to software applications not supporting characters in those languages. Pango is a combination of two different words which naturally, given the mission of the software, come from two different languages. Pan is a Greek word meaning “all” and go is a Japanese word meaning “languages.” Indeed, that is what Pango hopes to support — all languages. Pango hopes to aid those who speak underrepresented languages by creating software that can render nearly every language in the world electronically. The job is not easy. Many languages have their own set of peculiarities that must be taken into account. The code must be written in such a way that it does not exclude an
Pango is an open source library to draw (render) texts in various languages/scripts. It helps programs to handle worldwide written languages. Pango is used in various open source projects. Examples include GTK, whose components draw texts through pango. Pango is not a font (character) rendering system; in fact, it requires some font rendering backend, e.g. FreeType. A problem of the font rendering engine such as FreeType is that they primarily renders character by character basis and minimally takes care about the placement of characters. They usually let application programs handle complex character layout issues. (You will see examples of simple vs complex character layout later in this memo.) Pango just does it. An example is the folding behaviour of a long paragraph into lines. FreeType gives application programs no hint when a line should be interrupted. In the current SL viewer, it is handled by the viewer code itself. The problem is, the viewer simply looks for a space character
