Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...
library used by software developers for laying out and rendering text in high quality, emphasising support for multilingual text. Different font backends can be used, allowing cross-platform support, so that Pango-rendered text will appear similar under different operating systems, such as Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
.
Utilization
Pango has been integrated into most Linux distributions. The GTK+
GTK+
GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
UI toolkit uses Pango for all of its text rendering. The Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
").
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
Verdana
Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group...
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: şţ(en) and şţ(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
Cairo (graphics)
cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends...
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
fonts. Its purpose is to standardize text layout in FOSS
Foss
Foss may refer toPeople*Foss , people with the last name Foss*Foss Shanahan , New Zealand diplomat*Foss Westcott , English bishop...
; its code originally started as part of the FreeType
FreeType
FreeType is a software library written in C that implements a font rasterization engine. It is used to render text on to bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations.-Details:...
Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers...
and Pango, and finally merged back into a common repository. Both Qt and Pango currently use HarfBuzz; other standalone users include Firefox and Chromium
Chromium (web browser)
Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code. The project's hourly Chromium snapshots appear essentially similar to the latest builds of Google Chrome aside from the omission of certain Google additions, most noticeable among them: Google's...
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
Uniscribe is the Microsoft Windows set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text, especially complex text layout. They are implemented in the DLL USP10.DLL. USP10.dll became available to the public with Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0...
WorldScript was the multilingual text rendering engine for Apple Macintosh before Mac OS X was introduced.Starting with version 7.1, Apple unified the implementation of non-Roman script systems in a programming interface called WorldScript. WorldScript I was used for all one-byte character sets and...
(Old Macintosh multilingual text rendering engine)
Core Text is a Core Foundation style API in Mac OS X, first introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, made public in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and introduced for the iPad with iPhone SDK 3.2. Exposing a C API, it replaces the text rendering abilities of the now-deprecated QuickDraw and ATSUI frameworks in...
(modern multilingual text rendering engine introduced in Mac OS X 10.5)
Graphite is a programmable Unicode-compliant smart-font technology and rendering system developed by SIL International. It is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Common Public License....
(multiplatform open source smart-font renderer from SIL
SIL International
SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...
cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends...
a vector-based graphics library with multiple backends
FreeType is a software library written in C that implements a font rasterization engine. It is used to render text on to bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations.-Details:...
a software library that implements a font rasterization engine
FontForge is a typeface editor program developed by George Williams. FontForge is free software and is distributed under the BSD license. FontForge is available for several operating systems and is localized in several languages.- Features :Fontforge supports many font formats, including...
a typeface (font) editor program
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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