HarfBuzz

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This article is about computing. For other meanings see Pango (disambiguation).

Pango
Pango name written as intended
Developed by	Behdad Esfahbod
OS	Unix-like
Type	Text rendering
License	LGPL
Website	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.

1 Utilization
2 Name
3 Support for OpenType features
4 Text and graphics
5 HarfBuzz
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

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.^[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

Default rendering above, localized Romanian rendering below.

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 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.

References

^ Fedora Project. ""Fedora Core 6 Release Notes"". Retrieved on 2007-03-09.

External links

Projects hosted by freedesktop.org

Components	X.Org Server · D-Bus · HAL · XCB · nouveau · GTK-Qt · Portland Project · Avahi · Swfdec · FriBidi · Compiz

Libraries	Cairo · Fontconfig · HarfBuzz · Mesa 3D · Poppler · interface (Direct Rendering Infrastructure · Xft)

Frameworks	Galago · GeoClue · GStreamer · Telepathy