The goal of the Pango project is to provide an open-source framework for the
layout and rendering of internationalized text. Pango is an offshoot of the
GTK+ and GNOME projects, and the initial focus is operation in those
environments, however there is nothing fundamentally GTK+ or GNOME specific
about Pango. Pango uses Unicode for all of its encoding, and will eventually
support output in all the worlds major languages. 

WWW: http://www.pango.org/