HarfBuzz

HarfBuzz
Developer(s) Behdad Esfahbod, Simon Hausmann, Martin Hosken, Jonathan Kew, Lars Knoll, Werner Lemberg, Owen Taylor, David Turner
Stable release 1.3.3 (26 October 2016 (2016-10-26)) [±]
Repository cgit.freedesktop.org/harfbuzz/
Written in C++
Operating system Windows, Unix-like
Type Software development library
License MIT
Website freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz

HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian حرف‌باز harf-bāz, meaning "Opentype")[1] is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. The newest version, New HarfBuzz, targets various font technologies while the first version, Old HarfBuzz, targeted only OpenType fonts.[2] New HarfBuzz provides only text shaping functions and not text layout or rendering, which require other libraries. Pango, which incorporates HarfBuzz, can be used for higher-level text layout, and FreeType or Anti-Grain Geometry for text rendering.

The goals for New HarfBuzz, as set by the developers, are for HarfBuzz to be beautiful, robust, flexible, efficient, and portable. Some potential applications that are a good fit for HarfBuzz are: graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits, web browsers, word processors, designer tools, font design tools, terminal emulators, batch document processors, and TeX engines.[3]

History

Behdad Esfahbod, developer of HarfBuzz

HarfBuzz evolved from code that was originally part of the FreeType project. It was then developed separately in Qt and Pango. Then it was merged back into a common repository with an MIT license. 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.[4]

Major users

As of 2016, HarfBuzz users include the open-source toolkits Qt, Pango (GTK+), Mapnik; and the standalone applications Firefox, Chromium,[5] XeTeX, and LibreOffice (Linux version only since 4.1,[6] all platforms since 5.3[7]).

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "HarfBuzz". freedesktop.org.
  2. ↑ "HarfBuzz Official website". Retrieved 10 November 2012.
  3. ↑ HarfBuzz presentation slides from the Internationalization & Unicode Conference, October 2009.
  4. ↑ "O'Reilly Open Source Awards: OSCON 2013". 26 July 2013.
  5. ↑ Esfahbod, Behdad (18 January 2010). "State of Text Rendering". Retrieved 10 November 2012.
  6. ↑ "Release Notes 4.1". Wiki. The Document Foundation. 10 July 2013. Retrieved 12 July 2013.
  7. ↑ "Release Notes 5.3". Wiki. The Document Foundation. 11 November 2016. Retrieved 17 November 2016.

External links

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