Pango 1.44 Is Coming Thanks To The Revival By GNOME Developers

Back in May there were the plans shared by Red Hat's Matthias Clasen to work out some improvements to the Pango layout engine library after going fairly stale in recent years. That work is coming to fruition with a Pango 1.44 release looking like it will be here soon with new features.

Clasen shared an update today on his Pango hacking. Some of the improvements made include deprecating PangoScript in favor of GUnicodeScript, providing access to the underlying Harfbuzz font object from a PangoFont object in order to avoid redundant APIs in the future, reducing its dependence on FreeType, utilizing Harfbuzz for font shaping on all platforms now, and providing unhinted rendering support.

In step with this Pango work, Clasen also added sub-pixel positioning inside Cairo that is used for the unhinted rendering.

More details on this Pango 1.44 feature work via blogs.gnome.org.