As you know, we recently switched our text system to a new library called Pango. Now that some of the worst bugs and regressions are fixed (definitely not all), and we need your help in testing it thoroughly.

1. Here are the confirmed Pango niceties so far (i.e. what is tested and works):

- Text is much smoother. No more ugly autohinting gaps between letters in small sizes. Letters move smoothly when you change letterspacing by Alt+< and Alt+>.

- Auto kerning pairs (from the font) now work. For example "AV" will now be kerned together automatically in most decent fonts.

- On Windows, non-ASCII text works (tested with Cyrillic). Localized font face names (such as "italic" translated into a local language for Windows fonts such as Arial) are no longer a problem.

2. Here is what SHOULD work now but is not yet tested because we don't speak these languages. This is where we need your help:

- Right-To-Left text (Hebrew, Arabic) and BIDI (bidirectional mixed text) seems to work but I'm not sure.

- Contextual letterforms that depend on the position in a word and script-specific ligatures (Devanagari) should work.

- Chinese and Japanese need testing, especially for how good vertical text works (it is enabled by a button in the Text and Font dialog).

3. And finally the things that don't work (yet):

- Symbol fonts seem to have problems, at least the symbol.ttf from Windows. Any help or insights is appreciated.

- Fuzzy font matching that worked in 0.38 is not reenabled yet. (No warnings on font substitutions, etc.) Only Italic and Bold faces within a family work so far. This is being worked on.

So, grab the latest CVS and play with text as much as you can. We're interested to hear any reports, positive as well as negative. Thanks!

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