Pango – 1.0: The Rendering Pipeline
Description: Reference for Pango-1.0: The Rendering Pipeline

# The Rendering Pipeline

The Pango rendering pipeline takes a string of Unicode characters, converts them it into glyphs, and renders them on some output medium. This section describes the various stages of this pipeline and the APIs that implement them.

Itemization
  breaks a piece of text into segments with consistent direction and shaping properies. Among other things, this determines which font to use for each character. Use pango_itemize() or pango_itemize_with_base_dir() to itemize text.
Shaping
  converts characters into glyphs. Use pango_shape(), pango_shape_full() or pango_shape_with_flags() to shape text.
Line Breaking
  determines where line breaks should be inserted into a sequence of glyphs. The function pango_break() determines possible line breaks. The actual line breaking is done by `PangoLayout`.
Justification
  adjusts inter-word spacing to form lines of even length. This is done by `PangoLayout`.
Rendering
  takes a string of positioned glyphs, and renders them onto a surface. This is accomplished by a `PangoRenderer` object. The functions pango_cairo_show_glyph_string() and pango_cairo_show_layout() use a `PangoRenderer` to draw text onto a cairo surface.