The Pango backends written for Win32 is pangowin32. Pangowin32 uses
the Win32 GDI font API. GTK+ 2.8 and later on Win32 however actually
uses the pangocairo backend (which then uses only small parts of
pangowin32). Much of the GDI font API calls are in cairo.

The pangoft2 backend was originally written with Win32 in mind, but
its main use nowadays is on other platforms than Win32.

There are two ways to build Pango for Win32:

1) Use gcc (mingw), libtool, make, like on Unix.

If building from CVS, run the autogen.sh script that runs aclocal,
automake, autoconf and configure to build makefiles etc. This is what
tml@novell.com uses. Pass the same switches to autogen.sh that you
would pass to the configure script.

If building from a tarball, just running the configure script and then
make should be enough. But, as always, you need to understand what is
happening and follow the progress in case manual intervention is
needed.

If you want to support complex scripts (which you should!), you need
the usp10.h header from the Platform SDK. Otherwise the basic-win32
shaper module won' use Uniscribe and for instance Arabic and Indic
scripts will look like crap. (Yes, complex script support *is*
important. It is one of the main selling points of GTK+ and Pango.)
Pass the --with-usp10 flag to the configure script to tell it where
you have the Platform SDK (or other source of an "usp10.h" or
"include/usp10.h" file).

tml ran the configure script like this when building binaries for
Pango 1.10.0:

PATH=/devel/dist/glib-2.8.0/bin:$PATH ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /devel/dist/glib-2.8.0/share/aclocal" PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/devel/dist/glib-2.8.0/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH CC='gcc -mtune=pentium3' CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/gnu/include' LDFLAGS='-L/opt/gnu/lib' CFLAGS=-O ./configure --disable-gtk-doc --with-usp10=/opt/psdk  --without-x --prefix=c:/devel/target/pango-1.10.0

The pango.modules file tends not to get automatically set up correctly
on Win32. Check that. Also make sure you set up a pango.aliases file
if you want to support non-Latin scripts. pango.aliases file used by
tml looks like this:

tahoma = "tahoma,browallia new,mingliu,simhei,gulimche,ms gothic,latha,mangal"
sans = "arial,browallia new,mingliu,simhei,gulimche,ms gothic,latha,mangal"
serif = "times new roman,angsana new,mingliu,simsun,gulimche,ms gothic,latha,mangal"
monospace = "courier new,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun,gulimche,ms gothic,latha,mangal"

2) Use MSVC and nmake. Use the makefile.msc makefiles. These makefiles
are supported by Hans Breuer. They requires manual editing. You need
to have the source code to some suitable version of glib in a sibling
directory. Ask Hans for advice.