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The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject. Please help improve the article with a good introductory style. (October 2009) |
| Παν語 Pango name written as intended |
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| Developer(s) | Behdad Esfahbod |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.26 / 2009-09-21 |
| Operating system | Unix-like,Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Text rendering |
| License | LGPL |
| Website | www.pango.org |
Pango (Παν語) is a free and open source computing library for shaping internationalized texts in high quality. Different font backends can be used, allowing cross-platform support.
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Utilization
Pango has been integrated into most Linux distributions. The GTK+ UI toolkit uses Pango for all of its text rendering. It also 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.[1] 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 feature. Finally, you can change the language on the fly in the same text using Pango markup, e.g.:
pango-view --font="Verdana 24" --markup --text 'In the same text: <span lang="en">şţ</span>(en) and <span lang="ro">şţ</span>(ro).'
The official showcase of Pango's script-aware features is here.
Text and graphics
Complete text handling and graphics rendering is provided when integrated with Cairo.
HarfBuzz
HarfBuzz (in Persian: حرفباز) is an effort to standardize text layout in FOSS, with code originally derived from the FreeType project and was developed separately in Qt and Pango, and finally merged back into a common repository. Both Qt and Pango use HarfBuzz nowadays; other standalone users include Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome.
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 smart-font renderer from SIL)
- Cairo a vector-based graphics library with multiple backends
- FreeType a software library that implements a font rasterization engine
- FontForge a typeface (font) editor program
References
- ^ Fedora Project. ""Fedora Core 6 Release Notes"". http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/fc6/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#id2949362. Retrieved 2009-04-02.
see also http://geoffpango.com
External links
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