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, though most usage so far as been in the context of the GTK+ widget toolkit. Pango forms the core of text and font handling for GTK+ 2. 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 Xft2 library, Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType library, Native fonts on Microsoft platforms. Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for particular combinations of script and font backend. Pango-1.2 ships with a wide selection of modules, including modules for Hebrew, Arabic, Hangul, Thai, and a number of Indic scripts. Virtually all of the world's major scripts are supported.

As well as the low level layout rendering routines, Pango includes PangoLayout, a high level driver for laying out entire blocks of text, and routines to assist in editing internationalized text.