Draft release announcement

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Here's a draft of the 2.0.0 release announcement for all four
libraries. Edits much appreciated.

Regards,
                                        Owen

The GTK+ team is proud to announce the release of version 2.0 of the
GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, and ATK).
The result of 3 years work with contributions from hundreds of
volunteers, GTK+-2.0 represents a major step forward in free software
user interface toolkits.

What is GTK+
============

GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user
interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for
projects ranging from small one-off projects to complete application
suites.

GTK+ is based on three libraries developed by the GTK+ team:

 - GLib is the low-level core library that forms the basis of GTK+ and
   GNOME. It provides data structure handling for C, portability
   wrappers, and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event
   loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system.
 
 - Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an 
   emphasis on internationalization. It forms the core of
   text and font handling for GTK+-2.0.

 - The ATK library provides a set of interfaces for accessibility.
   By supporting the ATK interfaces, an application or toolkit can
   be used such as tools such as screen readers, magnifiers,
   and alternative input devices.

One of the strengths of GTK+ is that it has been designed from
the ground up to allow it to be easily used from a range of languages,
not just from C, the language in which it is written. Using GTK+
from languages such as Perl and Python provides a very effective
method of rapid application development.

Earlier versions of GTK+ have been used in a wide range of applications; 
perhaps the most well known examples being the GNOME desktop and 
the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Version 2.0 of GTK+
offers the same flexibility that made GTK+-1.0 and GTK+-1.2 so
popular, combined with a much enhanced feature set, ease of programming
for application developers, and ease of use for end users.

GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the
licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all
developers, including those developing proprietary software, without
any license fees or royalties.

What's new in GTK+-2.0
======================

 - Enhanced internationalization support via Pango including full
   Unicode support throughout all GTK+ widgets, support for 
   right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, and for 
   Indic languages.

 - A powerful text widget, supporting multiple views of a single buffer,
   a complete set of options for styled text, and the full range of 
   internationalization capabilities provided by Pango.

 - A very flexible widget for tree and list display, with features
   such as model view split for abstracting data storage from display,
   the ability to create custom models to accommodate large data sets, 
   a highly customizable system for controlling how model data is 
   converted into the display and cell editing, 

 - Support for accessibility technology via the ATK toolkit.

 - Integration of the gdk-pixbuf library for loading and manipulating
   images.

 - Hundreds of improvements to the programming interfaces to address
   specific difficulties developers had with earlier versions of GTK+.

 - Usability improvements, including comprehensive support for keyboard
   navigation.

 - A new clean and attractive default appearance.

 - Abstraction of the type and object system so that it can be used
   not just for widgets, but for programmatic objects throughout the
   GTK+ libraries.

 - Previews of ports to Microsoft Windows and direct frame buffer display.
   (A final version of the Windows port is expected within a few months.)

Where to get more information about GTK+-2.0
============================================

Information about GTK+ including links to documentation can be
found at http://www.gtk.org.

More information about ATK can be found at 
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap

 - Complete GTK+-2.0.0 release announcement - http://
 - GLib-2.0.0 release announcement - http://
 - Pango-1.0.0 release announcement - http://
 - ATK-1.0.0 release announcement - http://....

An installation guide for GTK+-2.0 is found at:

 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-building.html