HarfBuzz

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Open source text shaping library

title: "HarfBuzz" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["digital-typography", "free-computer-libraries", "free-software-programmed-in-c", "freedesktop.org", "gnome-libraries", "text-rendering-libraries", "software-using-the-mit-license"] description: "Open source text shaping library" topic_path: "general/digital-typography" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Open source text shaping library ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]

FieldValue
nameHarfBuzz
logoHarfBuzz.svg
logo_sizex64px
authorThe FreeType Project
developerBehdad Esfahbod, Khaled Hosny
programming languageC++
operating systemUnix-like, Windows
genreSoftware development library
licenseMIT
::

| name = HarfBuzz | logo = HarfBuzz.svg | logo_size = x64px | author = The FreeType Project | developer = Behdad Esfahbod, Khaled Hosny | programming language = C++ | operating system = Unix-like, Windows | genre = Software development library | license = MIT

HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian calque حرف‌باز harf-bāz, literally "open type"){{cite web | url = https://lwn.net/Articles/741722/ | title = HarfBuzz brings professional typography to the desktop | last = Byfield | first = Bruce | date = 19 December 2017 | website = LWN.net}}{{cite web | url = https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/HarfBuzz/ | title = HarfBuzz | work = freedesktop.org}} is a software library for supporting text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode 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 fonts.{{cite web | url = https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/ | title = HarfBuzz Official website | access-date = 10 November 2012}}

History

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.

Important milestones for New HarfBuzz include:

  • 0.9.2, SIL Graphite support
  • 1.0 includes Universal Shaping Engine concepts from Microsoft
  • 1.4 with OpenType font variation support
  • 1.6 with Unicode 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 support
  • 2.6.7 Unicode 13 support
  • 3.0 stable font subsetter API, Unicode 14 support
  • 4.0 more than 65536 Glyphs and metrics supported
  • 4.3 major speed up
  • 5.0 BE Fonts support
  • 5.2 Unicode 15 support
  • 7.0 introduced new APIs, new command-line utility, font emboldening support and reduced memory usage
  • 8.0 introduced support for using WebAssembly-based shaper embedded in fonts

Users

Most applications don't use HarfBuzz directly, but use a UI toolkit library that integrates with it.

HarfBuzz is used by the UI libraries of:

HarfBuzz is used directly by many applications, including:

References

References

  1. "State of Text Rendering 2024".
  2. (26 July 2013). "O'Reilly Open Source Awards: OSCON 2013".
  3. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=harfbuzz-1.0-released HarfBuzz 1.0 Implements Microsoft's Universal Shaping Engine Released]
  4. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HarfBuzz-1.4-Released HarfBuzz 1.4 Brings OpenType GX / Font Variations]
  5. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HarfBuzz-1.8-Unicode-11 HarfBuzz 1.8 Released With Unicode 11 Support]
  6. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HarfBuzz-2.0-Released HarfBuzz 2.0 Released For Advancing Open-Source Text Shaping]
  7. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=HarfBuzz HarfBuz articles on Phoronix]
  8. "Release 3.0.0 · harfbuzz/harfbuzz".
  9. "HarfBuzz 4.0 Released for This Open-Source Text Shaping Library".
  10. "HarfBuzz 4.3 Released with Big Performance Improvements".
  11. "HarfBuzz 5.0 Released with Progress on Supporting the "Boring Expansion" Font Spec".
  12. "HarfBuzz 5.2 Released with Unicode 15 Support".
  13. "HarfBuzz 7.0 Text Shaping Engine Released".
  14. "HarfBuzz 8.0 Released - Introduces Shaper for WebAssembly within Font Files".
  15. "HarfBuzz".
  16. "JEP 258: HarfBuzz Font-Layout Engine".
  17. "Flutter Engine Wiki".
  18. Engine, Godot. "Complex text layouts progress report #1".
  19. Engine, Godot. "Godot 4.0 sets sail: All aboard for new horizons".
  20. (2024-10-28). "Announcing Full RTL Language Support".
  21. "OpenHarmony/third_party_harfbuzz".
  22. (30 July 2013). "LibreOffice 4.1 ReleaseNotes". The Document Foundation.
  23. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-New-Layout-Engine LibreOffice 5.3 Enables New Layout Engine By Default]
  24. (2017-05-22). "Scribus 1.5.3 Released".
  25. (2022-06-07). "Unified Text Engine in Photoshop".
  26. (2023-10-30). "Feature summary of InDesign (October 2023 release)".
  27. (2016-11-07). "Debugging Data Corruption with Emscripten {{!}} Figma Blog".
  28. (2020-05-30). "Rasmus Andersson on Twitter: "Figma uses FreeType and Harfbuzz for font layout...".
  29. Hosny, Khaled. (2013-03-12). "[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.9999.0 released".
  30. Hosny, Khaled. (2013). "What is new in XeTeX 0.9999?". TUGboat.
  31. "[Dev-luatex] Luatex 1.11.1 announcement - dev-luatex - NTG Mailing Lists".
  32. Hosny, Khaled. (2019). "Bringing world scripts to LuaTeX: The HarfBuzz experiment". TUGboat.
  33. "Middle Eastern Support in QuarkXPress 2025".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

digital-typographyfree-computer-librariesfree-software-programmed-in-cfreedesktop.orggnome-librariestext-rendering-librariessoftware-using-the-mit-license