If we decide to use Pango, we would need to, roughly in sequence:
(1) Make glib 2.0 available on all our platforms (2) Make small changes to Pango to allow us to better control the initialization of FreeType (about 10 LOC); hopefully we should be able to get this into the official Pango tree. (3) Get Pango to compile on all our platforms; this would require some new code at least to load the FreeType library. (4) Get FreeType to compile on all our platforms; this should not be a problem. (5) Develop a new XP font manager (some, but not much platform code needed), no complexities here, all we need to is to be able to retrieve font names and associate them with their Pango descriptions (not unlike the Unix font manager), probably from a pregenerated text file. (6) replace the current shaping engine with Pango. (7) get the existing Pango language modules other than Hebrew and Arabic to work with the FreeType back end. I have no idea how much work this would be, but without it we would have only support for Hebrew and Arabic, albeit much better than we have now. I would do (2) and (6) and contribute to (5); if we there are volunteers to commit to (1), (3), (4) and (5), then I think it is worth a try. Probably best to start with conditional compilation, because there is no way of telling what the performance will be like. I would appreciate feedback on whether people think we have the resources to do this. Tomas
