Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an emphasis on internationalization. pango can be used anywhere that text layout is needed. however, most of the work on pango-1.0 was done using the gtk+ widget toolkit as a test platform. pango forms the core of text and font handling for gtk+-2.0.

pango is designed to be modular; the core pango layout can be used with four different font backends:
- core x windowing system fonts
- client-side fonts on x using the xft library
- direct rendering of scalable fonts using the freetype library
- native fonts on microsoft backends
this package can be used by other packages using the girepository format to generate dynamic bindings