GNOME Developers Plot Future Improvements For Pango

The Pango layout engine library that's been around for nearly two decades and used by GNOME's GTK and other software hasn't seen much love lately. Fortunately, Matthias Clasen and others are envisioning some improvements to this library and modeling it more around the HarfBuzz shaping engine work.

Clasen wrote a blog post today that while Pango is just in a "maintenance mode", they've been working on further improving it and the integration around HarfBuzz. Some areas for improvement being looked at are Unicode APIs, allowing direct access to HarfBuzz objects to avoid having to introduce new redundant APIs around HarfBuzz features, abandon the use of FreeType, and moving towards horizontally unhinted rendering along with subpixel positioning.

Those interested in this text layout engine can learn more about these planned improvements for Pango via Clasen's blog.