Comment 6 for bug 699460

The output you get from freetype is very impressive. Regarding Pango though, I don't think it is as bad as you think regarding dependencies and bitmaps.

Pango can be built without cairo and fontconfig dependencies. That said, pango is pretty ubiqutous anyway, so ought not to cause a big problem as a dependency. (Nor should cairo if we wanted to use it).

It should be possible to write in a pango renderer which uses pango to layout the glyphs, and you provide your own routine for drawing the glyphs (as vectors, for example). This "ought" to be possible without recompiling a custom pango, as the render is just a GType subclass of the PangoRenderer class. That said.. I've never tried to do it!

gschem uses a custom pango renderer to interpret overbar markers in the text stream and render overbars, for example. In that case I didn't have to replace the glyph rendering routines, as I just called / used pango's cairo rendering routines.