Pango is an OpenSource framework for the layout and rendering of internationalized text.
Pango is an offshoot of the GTK+ and GNOME projects, and the initial focus is operation in those environments, however there is nothing fundamentally GTK+ or GNOME specific about Pango. Pango uses Unicode for all of its encoding, and will eventually support output in all the worlds major languages.
One page links to Pango:
http://www.pango.org/