GNOME Developers Are Looking At Sprucing Up Pango

GNOME developers want to make sure they have a competitive text rendering stack with other platforms and as such are looking to make some modernization improvements to Pango.

Pango as a refresher is the text layout library used by GTK+ as well as other applications and works in hand with the HarfBuzz shaping engine for the display/placement of text.

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen laid out plans for improving Pango with utilizing Harfbuzz for text shaping everywhere, providing an API to access the Harfbuzz objects, updating the Emoji iterator, shifting around code that needs to be updated with Unicode, adding some other new APIs, and supporting sub-pixel positioning.

Clasen shared these brief plans for the Pango library Tuesday on the GNOME list. He has also opened the tickets on the Gitlab tracker for tracking the progress as part of action items for the Pango 1.44 release. We'll see if these Pango features can be achieved in time for the GNOME 3.32 release due out in March 2019.