Pango-1.12.0 released

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

Pango-1.12.0 is now available for download at:

   ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.10/

86c3e08169a18200e64a0c5ee1be7fd9  pango-1.12.0.tar.bz2
3bb2dc0ec60e9673f2f7b6894b3d1caa  pango-1.12.0.tar.gz

This is a stable release providing new functionality as compared
to Pango-1.10, while maintaining source and binary compatibility.
Notable improvements in Pango since version 1.10 include:

 * Addition of a cairo+ATSUI backend for rendering using
   native fonts on MacOS X platform.

 * Lots of optimizations.  The PangoLayout operations should
   be around 30% or more faster.

 * Improved robustness.  Pango almost doesn't crash anymore,
   even in very hard conditions that fonts are missing or
   unusable.

 * Supporting OpenType layout features for basic scripts like
   Latin/Greek/Cyrillic.

 * Installing a simple tool called pango-view which is mostly
   useful for testing purposes.  It is suggested that
   distributions include it in their devel package for the least.


About Pango
===========

Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an emphasis
on internationalization. Pango can be used anywhere that text layout
is needed, though most of the work on Pango so far has been done in
the context of the GTK+ widget toolkit. Pango forms the core of text
and font handling for GTK+-2.x.

Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout engine can
be used with different font backends. There are three basic
backends, with multiple options for rendering with each.

 - Client side fonts using the FreeType and fontconfig libraries.
   Rendering can be with with Cairo or Xft libraries, or directly
   to an in-memory buffer with no additional libraries.

 - Native fonts on Microsoft Windows. (Optionally using Uniscribe
   for complex-text handling). Rendering can be done via Cairo
   or directly using the native Win32 API.

 - Native fonts on MacOS X, rendering via Cairo.

The integration of Pango with Cairo (http://cairographics.org)
provides a complete solution with high quality text handling
and graphics rendering.

Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for particular
combinations of script and font backend. Pango ships with a wide
selection of modules, including modules for Hebrew, Arabic,
Hangul, Thai, and a number of Indic scripts. Virtually all of the
world's major scripts are supported.

As well as the low level layout rendering routines, Pango
includes PangoLayout, a high level driver for laying out entire
blocks of text, and routines to assist in editing
internationalized text.

More information about Pango is available from http://www.pango.org/.

Pango 1.12.0 depends on version 2.10.0 or newer of the GLib
library; more information about GLib can be found at
http://www.gtk.org/.

Bugs should be reported to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/.


Special thanks to:

  Billy Biggs [Optimization]
  Anders Carlsson [ATSUI backend]
  Matthias Clasen [General assistance]
  Antoine Dopffer [General assistance]
  Tor Lillqvist [Win32 backend]
  Federico Mena Quintero [Optimization]
  Owen Taylor [Discussion]

Thanks to all Pango-1.12 contributors, including:

  Jean Brefort, Hans Breuer, Brian Cameron, LingNing Zhang


Behdad Esfahbod
13 March 2006