12. Pango
Pango
provides an open-source framework for the layout and rendering
of internationalized text and uses Unicode for all of its
encoding. It aims to eventually support output in all the major
languages. When GNOME 2.0 comes out, the text rendering is
expected to be by Pango. Pango is expected to be the panacea
for complex font schemes like kanji, arabic/hebrew
(bidirectional), so Tamil is no problem. Tamil is one of the
early languages in Pango - right there in the first public
version. Sivaraj provided TSCII support, which was later
extended to TAB by Vikram.