As most of you know, the principle focus for the 0.39 release is slated to be "Pangoification". While we expect that there's going to be a number of new features, bug fixes, code cleanups, etc. our project's top objective for this release is to replace libnrtype with Pango.
This of course brings up the questions, "Huh? Pango? Libnrtype? Whazzalat?"
The following document provides a broad overview to this effort, explaining what Libnrtype and Pango are and what we gain by replacing the former by the latter. It's hoped that this will serve as an easy orientation into this work for those of us who don't know a lot about fonts but may be interested in lending a hand.
http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Pangoification
(If you spot any inaccuracies, don't be shy about clicking edit and fix it up!)
Bryce