HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language w ...

''harf-bāz'', literally "open type") is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

text to glyph indices and positions. The newer version, ''New HarfBuzz'' (2012–), targets various font technologies while the first version, ''Old HarfBuzz'' (2006–2012), targeted only

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

fonts.

History

HarfBuzz evolved from code that was originally part of the FreeType project. It was then developed separately in Qt and

Pango Pango (stylized as Παν語) is a text (i.e. glyph) layout engine library which works with the HarfBuzz shaping engine for displaying multi-language text. Full-function rendering of text and cross-platform support is achieved when Pango is us ...

. Then it was merged back into a common repository with an

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

. This was Old HarfBuzz, which is no longer being developed, as the path going forward is New HarfBuzz. In 2013, Behdad Esfahbod won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for his work on HarfBuzz. Important milestones for new HarfBuzz include: * 0.9.2,

Graphite (SIL) Graphite is a programmable Unicode-compliant smart font technology and rendering system developed by SIL International as free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Common Public License. Capabil ...

support * 1.0 includes

Universal Shaping Engine Uniscribe is the Microsoft Windows set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text, supporting complex text layout. It is implemented in the dynamic link library . Uniscribe has been released with Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0. In addi ...

concepts from Microsoft * 1.4 with

font variation support * 1.6 with

10 support * 1.8 with Unicode 11 support * 2.0 with Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) shaping support. * 2.1 with color fonts support and improved major AAT Shaping features. * 2.4 Unicode 12 * 2.6.7 Unicode 13 * 3.0 stable API, Unicode 14 support

Users

Most applications don't use HarfBuzz directly, but use a

UI toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of programs. Most widge ...

library that integrates with it. HarfBuzz is used by the UI libraries of GNOME ( GTK+), KDE ( Qt),

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfa ...

( Skia), PlayStation 4, Android,

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

, and Flutter; and directly by applications Chromium,

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

(from version 4.1 on Linux only, from 5.3 on all platforms),

Scribus Scribus () is free and open-source desktop publishing (DTP) software available for most desktop operating systems. It is designed for layout, typesetting, and preparation of files for professional-quality image-setting equipment. Scribus can a ...

, and

Inkscape Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Other formats can be imported and exported. Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes (e.g. rec ...

References

External links

*
Old Harfbuzz
{{Free and open-source typography Digital typography Free computer libraries Free software programmed in C Freedesktop.org GNOME libraries Text rendering libraries

History

Users

See also

References

External links