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.