This is a stable release providing new functionality as compared to Pango-1.2, while maintaining source and binary compatibility. Notable improvements in Pango since version 1.2:

* Support for characters beyond the basic-multilingual plane of Unicode and updates of character properties to match Unicode-4.0.

* The same modules are now used for the Xft and fontconfig backends, reducing code duplication, and making it easier to create new backends independent of Pango that use fontconfig and FreeType.

* A better font and shaper selection algorithm is now used that takes script information into account.

* Bidirectional base direction can now be automatically determined from the text instead of explicitly set by the application.

* Improvements to OpenType handling, especially for the GPOS table. GPOS features are now enabled for Arabic.

pango-1.4.0.tar.bz2 md5sum: 9b5d9a5dcce5b3899d401f9c2cd6873f
pango-1.4.0.tar.gz md5sum: 14c4938fc0263eabd1a5b0f32cb5f6fa