The SDL_Pango project is a library for rendering text within SDL based projects using the Pango text layout and rendering library. It is an alternative to SDL_ttf that better supports internationalisation by falling back to other fonts when glyphs are missing.
It has been abandoned for many years and does not support SDL2 upstream yet, but there is a patch by the TuxPaint folks. I’m one of the maintainers of a couple of open source games that use SDL and SDL_Pango and need to be ported to SDL2. I’d like to convert the CVS history of SDL_Pango to git (with the script I just wrote), add an SDL_Pango repository to the libsdl-org GitHub repository, push the CVS to git conversion to the new GitHub repository, add the patches from the SDL2 port created by the TuxPaint folks to the repository, forward all the SourceForge bugs to GitHub and collaboratively maintain the new project with the libSDL community.
Does anyone here use SDL_Pango for a project?
Does anyone think this is a bad idea?
Who should I ask to create the new libsdl-org GitHub repository?
Is anyone willing to join the maintenance of SDL_Pango?
I would be tempted to, because of its support for complex-text rendering which is lacking in SDL2_ttf, but it would have to be available for all the major platforms, including Android, iOS and Emscripten. Is that feasible?
Personally I am only interested in Linux, but of course others could
add support for other platforms if they are interested.
The Pango website claims support for Linux, Windows, macOS. Doing a web
search points a couple of mailing list discussions about Android,
presumably the macOS code could be ported to iOS and I see someone
built Pango with emscripten for Wesnoth in the browser.
Pango is licensed under the GNU LGPL, which is probably incompatible
with the ToS for the Apple/Android app stores and is harder to comply
with for static-linking-only platforms like iOS/Emscripten, since
presumably you want to distribute proprietary apps on those platforms.
A possible alternative is GitHub - markuskimius/SDL2_Pango: SDL2 port of SDL_Pango which seems to be a somewhat active fork of SDL_Pango converting it to SDL2. I have not audited this fork for correctness or safety, and I don’t know how it compares with Tuxpaint’s fork.
SDL upstream development is now focused on SDL3 (libsdl3 in Debian experimental), which is not yet API-stable. The upstream project is not necessarily going to be interested in adopting SDL2-based libraries.