Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format is no more, as the creators of Pango, one of the most widely used text rendering libraries, announced their plans for Pango 1.44. Until recently, Pango used FreeType to draw fonts. They will be moving over to Harfbuzz, an evolution of FreeType. Why? In short, FreeType was hard to work with. It required complex logic, and provided no advantage over Harfbuzz (other than being able to fetch opentype metrics with ease). Upgrading to Pango v1.44 will break your GTK...
