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HarfBuzz

HarfBuzz is a text shaping engine. It primarily supports OpenType, but also Apple Advanced Typography. HarfBuzz is used in Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Firefox, GNOME, GTK+, KDE, Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, XeTeX, PlayStation, Microsoft Edge, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Godot Engine, Unreal Engine, and other places.

xkcd-derived image

For bug reports, mailing list, and other information please visit:

http://harfbuzz.org/

For license information, see COPYING.

Documentation

For user manual as well as API documentation, check: https://harfbuzz.github.io

Download

For tarball releases of HarfBuzz, look here. At the same place you will also find Win32/Win64 binary bundles that include libharfbuzz DLL, hb-view.exe, hb-shape.exe, and all dependencies.

The canonical source tree is available on github. Both development and user support discussion around HarfBuzz happens on github as well.

The API that comes with hb.h will not change incompatibly. Other, peripheral, headers are more likely to go through minor modifications, but again, we do our best to never change API in an incompatible way. We will never break the ABI.

Development

For build information, see BUILD.md.

For custom configurations, see CONFIG.md.

For testing and profiling, see TESTING.md.

For using with Python, see README.python.md. There is also uharfbuzz.

For cross-compiling to Windows from Linux or macOS, see README.mingw.md.

To report bugs or submit patches please use github issues and pull-requests.

Developer documents

To get a better idea of where HarfBuzz stands in the text rendering stack you may want to read State of Text Rendering 2024. Here are a few presentation slides about HarfBuzz at the Internationalization and Unicode Conference over the years:

More presentations and papers are available on behdad's website. In particular, the following documents are relevant to HarfBuzz development:

  • 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: Caching — Paper
  • 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: hb-decycler — Paper
  • 2022 — HarfBuzz Study: hb-iter — Paper
  • 2022 — HarfBuzz Study: A C library written in C++ — Paper
  • 2022 — HarfBuzz Study: PackTab: A static integer table packer — Paper
  • 2014 — Reflections on Building the HarfBuzz Indic Shaper — Paper
  • 2012 — HarfBuzz Memory Consumption — Paper

Name

HarfBuzz (حرف‌باز) is the literal Persian translation of “OpenType”, transliterated using the Latin script. It also means "talkative" or "glib" (also a nod to the GNOME project where HarfBuzz originates from).

Background: Originally there was this font format called TrueType. People and companies started calling their type engines all things ending in Type: FreeType, CoolType, ClearType, etc. And then came OpenType, which is the successor of TrueType. So, for my OpenType implementation, I decided to stick with the concept but use the Persian translation. Which is fitting given that Persian is written in the Arabic script, and OpenType is an extension of TrueType that adds support for complex script rendering, and HarfBuzz is an implementation of OpenType complex text shaping.

Packaging status of HarfBuzz

Packaging status