[4] Full-function rendering of text and cross-platform support is achieved when Pango is used with platform APIs or third-party libraries, such as Uniscribe and FreeType, as text rendering backends.

[5] The name pango comes from Greek pan (παν, 'all') and Japanese go (語, 'language').

[6] In January 2000, the merger of the GScript and GnomeText projects was named Pango.

[13][14] Pango 1.17 and newer support the 'locl' feature tag that allows localized glyphs to be used for the same Unicode code point.

Setting the locale via the POSIX environment variable, e.g. LANG=ro_RO.UTF-8 will also cause Pango to use 'locl' font feature.