1---
2Title: The Rendering Pipeline
3---
4
5# The Rendering Pipeline
6
7The Pango rendering pipeline takes a string of Unicode characters, converts them
8it into glyphs, and renders them on some output medium. This section describes the
9various stages of this pipeline and the APIs that implement them.
10
11![Pango Rendering Pipeline](pipeline.png)
12
13Itemization
14: breaks a piece of text into segments with consistent direction and shaping
15  properies. Among other things, this determines which font to use for each
16  character. Use pango_itemize() or pango_itemize_with_base_dir() to itemize text.
17
18Shaping
19: converts characters into glyphs. Use pango_shape(), pango_shape_full() or
20  pango_shape_with_flags() to shape text.
21
22Line Breaking
23: determines where line breaks should be inserted into a sequence of glyphs.
24  The function pango_break() determines possible line breaks. The actual line
25  breaking is done by [class@Pango.Layout].
26
27Justification
28: adjusts inter-word spacing to form lines of even length. This is done by
29  [class@Pango.Layout].
30
31Rendering
32: takes a string of positioned glyphs, and renders them onto a surface. This is
33  accomplished by a [class@Pango.Renderer] object. The functions
34  pango_cairo_show_glyph_string() and pango_cairo_show_layout() use a
35  [class@Pango.Renderer] to draw text onto a cairo surface.
36