it's in Skia. Cairo can adapt to it. it's on GEGL with Gnome. Imgui might process it with AGG. Harfbuzz handles it through Fribidi, and Pango uses Harfbuzz. Just use Pango. Pango does it all. Pango has it for you.
June 1, 2026 at 5:04 AM
it's in Skia. Cairo can adapt to it. it's on GEGL with Gnome. Imgui might process it with AGG. Harfbuzz handles it through Fribidi, and Pango uses Harfbuzz. Just use Pango. Pango does it all. Pango has it for you.
im messing around with fonts and harfbuzz today
making a font that renders numbers as roman numerals :3
making a font that renders numbers as roman numerals :3
December 27, 2024 at 11:43 AM
im messing around with fonts and harfbuzz today
making a font that renders numbers as roman numerals :3
making a font that renders numbers as roman numerals :3
fairly prominent open source maintainer, straight up saying projects like Harfbuzz have to be deemed a "malicious fork". The sense of entitlement is shocking
June 26, 2026 at 9:16 PM
fairly prominent open source maintainer, straight up saying projects like Harfbuzz have to be deemed a "malicious fork". The sense of entitlement is shocking
What do you mean Harfbuzz put a fucking wasm interpreter in it fuck my life of course it fucking did
May 3, 2026 at 2:36 PM
What do you mean Harfbuzz put a fucking wasm interpreter in it fuck my life of course it fucking did
HarfBuzz is pretty much the only full-featured library for that takes font files, parses them, and returns glyphs ready to render. It is ubiquitous. A security flaw in HarfBuzz could make a good portion of the world's user-facing software (i.e. that renders text) unsafe.
March 5, 2026 at 11:34 AM
HarfBuzz is pretty much the only full-featured library for that takes font files, parses them, and returns glyphs ready to render. It is ubiquitous. A security flaw in HarfBuzz could make a good portion of the world's user-facing software (i.e. that renders text) unsafe.
It was the harfbuzz wasm shaper, of course.
May 3, 2026 at 2:39 PM
It was the harfbuzz wasm shaper, of course.
In Russian podcast by @nikitonsky I found out that the entire modern text rendering stack relies on a library called harfbuzz, which, in turn, relies on literally one person.
It only has 5K stars (in case you think stars reflect importance).
github.com/harfbuzz/har...
It only has 5K stars (in case you think stars reflect importance).
github.com/harfbuzz/har...
October 30, 2025 at 2:37 PM
In Russian podcast by @nikitonsky I found out that the entire modern text rendering stack relies on a library called harfbuzz, which, in turn, relies on literally one person.
It only has 5K stars (in case you think stars reflect importance).
github.com/harfbuzz/har...
It only has 5K stars (in case you think stars reflect importance).
github.com/harfbuzz/har...
HarfBuzz Continues Improving Its New GPU-Accelerated Text Shaping Library - https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-14.2-Released
HarfBuzz Continues Improving Its New GPU-Accelerated Text Shaping Library
Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements...
www.phoronix.com
April 21, 2026 at 12:30 AM
HarfBuzz Continues Improving Its New GPU-Accelerated Text Shaping Library - https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-14.2-Released
As @davidgerard.co.uk has posted elsewhere, the maintainer of the library HarfBuzz has gone all-in on vibe-coding.
typo.social/@behdad/1161... and xcancel.com/behdadesfahb... (apologies for linking to the Twitter proxy service)
A note on why this is a worry in the thread ->
typo.social/@behdad/1161... and xcancel.com/behdadesfahb... (apologies for linking to the Twitter proxy service)
A note on why this is a worry in the thread ->
behdad (@behdad@typo.social)
HarfBuzz 13.0.0 released with new experimental features: `hb-vector` for vector output of glyph outlines to SVG and `hb-raster` for rasterizing glyphs to A8 / BGRA32 images, among other features.
I w...
typo.social
March 5, 2026 at 11:34 AM
As @davidgerard.co.uk has posted elsewhere, the maintainer of the library HarfBuzz has gone all-in on vibe-coding.
typo.social/@behdad/1161... and xcancel.com/behdadesfahb... (apologies for linking to the Twitter proxy service)
A note on why this is a worry in the thread ->
typo.social/@behdad/1161... and xcancel.com/behdadesfahb... (apologies for linking to the Twitter proxy service)
A note on why this is a worry in the thread ->
Also like. Good luck forking harfbuzz? That's a C library that's on the critical path for most text rendering. You cannot realistically leave it alone indefinitely as the world moves forward.
June 26, 2026 at 9:24 PM
Also like. Good luck forking harfbuzz? That's a C library that's on the critical path for most text rendering. You cannot realistically leave it alone indefinitely as the world moves forward.
HarfBuzz 14.5.0 🎉
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/releases/tag/14.5.0
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/releases/tag/14.5.0
Release 14.5.0 · harfbuzz/harfbuzz
Update Unicode 18.0 data and script support, including script values for Jurchen, Proto-Cuneiform, and Seal, and the corresponding shaping support. Add support for VARC table subsetting, includin...
github.com
September 21, 2026 at 3:30 AM
HarfBuzz 14.5.0 🎉
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/releases/tag/14.5.0
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/releases/tag/14.5.0
Behdad Esfahbod is taking us through 20 years of text shaping with "HarfBuzz at 20!" at #WebEngineHackfest! 🚀
June 15, 2026 at 9:09 AM
Behdad Esfahbod is taking us through 20 years of text shaping with "HarfBuzz at 20!" at #WebEngineHackfest! 🚀
HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine - https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-12.3-Released
HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more...
www.phoronix.com
December 27, 2025 at 8:54 PM
HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine - https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-12.3-Released
🚀 Following Behdad Esfahbod's presentation, we are officially celebrating 20 years of HarfBuzz at #WebEngineHackfest! 🎉 From web browsers to billions of devices, thank you for making global text rendering possible. Cheers to 20 years!🥂
behdad.org
behdad.org
June 15, 2026 at 9:43 AM
🚀 Following Behdad Esfahbod's presentation, we are officially celebrating 20 years of HarfBuzz at #WebEngineHackfest! 🎉 From web browsers to billions of devices, thank you for making global text rendering possible. Cheers to 20 years!🥂
behdad.org
behdad.org
the solution to my issue with #threejs shapes when text shaping OTF and TTF files with harfbuzz was to build a new kind of text geometry to use instead of shapes. adding knuth-plass linebreaking next :)
March 8, 2025 at 9:18 AM
the solution to my issue with #threejs shapes when text shaping OTF and TTF files with harfbuzz was to build a new kind of text geometry to use instead of shapes. adding knuth-plass linebreaking next :)
And this harfbuzz was developed by an immigrant from Iran—the name of the library, حرفباز, means “open type” in Farsi.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behdad_...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behdad_...
October 30, 2025 at 2:37 PM
And this harfbuzz was developed by an immigrant from Iran—the name of the library, حرفباز, means “open type” in Farsi.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behdad_...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behdad_...
By the way in case you didn’t know: fonts can contain tiny programs for aligning their outlines to the pixel grid and (with the harfbuzz wasm table) text shaping
And there’s 3 hinting/alignment scripting languages! glyf, CFF and CFF2.
And there’s 3 hinting/alignment scripting languages! glyf, CFF and CFF2.
Gotten to the point in writing my custom font handler where I’m partially through writing a TTF hinting VM which I’ll probably scrap for an automatic approach and the only thing I’m *really* missing is a basic vector renderer.
I think I’ll just go for a simple bezier subdivision based renderer.
I think I’ll just go for a simple bezier subdivision based renderer.
April 22, 2025 at 4:24 AM
By the way in case you didn’t know: fonts can contain tiny programs for aligning their outlines to the pixel grid and (with the harfbuzz wasm table) text shaping
And there’s 3 hinting/alignment scripting languages! glyf, CFF and CFF2.
And there’s 3 hinting/alignment scripting languages! glyf, CFF and CFF2.
the kerning is bad in firefox but not in chrome, but i think they both use harfbuzz and freetype so i have no idea what the difference might be
October 11, 2024 at 8:27 PM
the kerning is bad in firefox but not in chrome, but i think they both use harfbuzz and freetype so i have no idea what the difference might be
Also progress on boring parts of the next Inochi2D update are being made, font listing (and font face creation) works for hairetsu now on Linux via FontConfig, FreeType and harfbuzz.
Still need to write the CoreText and GDI+ and Uniscribe backends as well.
Still need to write the CoreText and GDI+ and Uniscribe backends as well.
March 7, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Also progress on boring parts of the next Inochi2D update are being made, font listing (and font face creation) works for hairetsu now on Linux via FontConfig, FreeType and harfbuzz.
Still need to write the CoreText and GDI+ and Uniscribe backends as well.
Still need to write the CoreText and GDI+ and Uniscribe backends as well.
dude why are Linux package names so goof-ass 😂 harfbuzz. splix. soupsieve...
January 21, 2026 at 1:52 AM
dude why are Linux package names so goof-ass 😂 harfbuzz. splix. soupsieve...
👉 HarfBuzz is an open-source text shaping engine.
👉 Behdad Esfahbod gave a very cool demo using HarfBuzz (harfbuzz.github.io/hb-gpu-demo/) to compare WebGL and WebGPU for shaping and rasterisation in 3D within a browser.
👉 Behdad Esfahbod gave a very cool demo using HarfBuzz (harfbuzz.github.io/hb-gpu-demo/) to compare WebGL and WebGPU for shaping and rasterisation in 3D within a browser.
June 16, 2026 at 1:31 PM
👉 HarfBuzz is an open-source text shaping engine.
👉 Behdad Esfahbod gave a very cool demo using HarfBuzz (harfbuzz.github.io/hb-gpu-demo/) to compare WebGL and WebGPU for shaping and rasterisation in 3D within a browser.
👉 Behdad Esfahbod gave a very cool demo using HarfBuzz (harfbuzz.github.io/hb-gpu-demo/) to compare WebGL and WebGPU for shaping and rasterisation in 3D within a browser.
HarfBuzz 14.0 Released With New GPU Accelerated Text Rendering Library - https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-14.0-Released
HarfBuzz 14.0 Released With New GPU Accelerated Text Rendering Library
HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library...
www.phoronix.com
April 1, 2026 at 3:28 PM
HarfBuzz 14.0 Released With New GPU Accelerated Text Rendering Library - https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-14.0-Released
FontForge now supports HarfBuzz-based font preview: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/pull/5522
Special thanks to Khaled Hosny @khaled for kind and thorough code review!
#fontforge #harfbuzz #foss #opensource #typography
Special thanks to Khaled Hosny @khaled for kind and thorough code review!
#fontforge #harfbuzz #foss #opensource #typography
July 3, 2025 at 5:41 PM
FontForge now supports HarfBuzz-based font preview: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/pull/5522
Special thanks to Khaled Hosny @khaled for kind and thorough code review!
#fontforge #harfbuzz #foss #opensource #typography
Special thanks to Khaled Hosny @khaled for kind and thorough code review!
#fontforge #harfbuzz #foss #opensource #typography