HarfBuzz is an OpenType text shaping engine.
It solves the problem of selecting and positioning glyphs from a font given a Unicode string.
Text shaping is an integral part of preparing text for display. It’s a fairly low level operation; HarfBuzz is used directly by graphic rendering libraries such as Pango, and the layout engines in Firefox, LibreOffice and Chromium.
If you are writing a layout engine or graphics library yourself, you will need to perform text shaping, and this is where HarfBuzz comes in play.
HarfBuzz began its life as text shaping code within the FreeType project, but was then abstracted out to its own project.
Key Features
- Text shaping turns codepoints into glyph IDs.
- Involves querying the font’s ligature tables and determining what substitutions should be made
- Chooses the correct glyph from the sequence of characters provided.
- Unicode 10.
Website: harfbuzz.github.io
Support: Documentation, GitHub code repository
Developer: Behdad Esfahbod, Simon Hausmann, Martin Hosken, Jonathan Kew, Lars Knoll, Werner Lemberg, Roozbeh Pournader, Owen Taylor, David Turner
License: MIT License
HarfBuzz is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Font Renderers | |
|---|---|
| HarfBuzz | OpenType text shaping engine |
| FreeType | Small and efficient software font engine |
| Pango | International text layout and rendering with rich script support |
| LibICU | Libraries for Unicode and internationalization |
| Fontconfig | Library for configuring and customizing font access |
| COSMIC Text | Rust library for rich multi-line text layout, shaping and editing |
| FriBidi | Implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm |
| Swash | Pure Rust toolkit for glyph shaping, scaling and rendering |
| SheenBidi | Compact Unicode bidirectional algorithm implementation for text engines |
| Raqm | Bidirectional layout and shaping for complex writing systems |
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