The free and open text shaping library / font platform
Joined October 2015
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- Following829
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HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
The 'boring-expansion' set of proposals that I made back in 2022, with the help of Google Fonts and industry colleagues, have finally become part of the new ISO Open Font Format 5th edition international font format standard. It _only_ took four years...
The proposals include the `avar` version 2 table for more expressive variable font designspaces, variable-composites, as well as fonts with more than 65 thousand glyphs.
PDF can be downloaded for free, albeit after a checkout process and watermarked to the individual.
iso.org/standard/14496-22
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
At the #WebEnginesHackfest today after my presentation "@HarfBuzz at 20!", the organizers surprised me with a 🎂. Thank you @webhackfest!
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
Now with Metal & WebGPU implementations in the library / demo as well. Both WebGL and WebGPU demos can be seen at behdad.org/hb-gpu-demo/
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
I'm thinking about folding GLyphy into a new harfbuzz-gpu (hb-gpu.h) library. Thoughts? #gamedev
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
Open Source GPU text rasterization update:
Recently, Eric Lengyel dedicated his patent on the Slug algorithm to the public domain and released Slug's shaders as Open Source software.
I am happy to announce that GLyphy now implements the Slug algorithm:
github.com/behdad/glyphy
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
A wave of manic energy in December had me put together a long deck called "HarfBuzz at 20! " , celebrating 20 years of @HarfBuzz. 🎂
I designed the deck to be presented at the #WebEnginesHackfest later this year. Then reality hit that I cannot present this deck in any sane amount of time.
Inspired by all the great presentations coming out of #FOSDEM today, I decided that instead of tossing the deck out, I just put it out here to be read by the curious. I will present a highly condensed version at the hackfest in June.
Let me know what you think. 🙏
docs.google.com/presentation…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
I have an update about experimental HarfRust performance that I like to share:
"To beat @HarfBuzz with #HarfRust" docs.google.com/document/d/1…
TL;DR:
Previous performance comparisons of HarfRust to HarfBuzz were flawed in that the HarfBuzz code tested had assert statements enabled. This skewed the numbers in favor of HarfRust. Moreover, since the last measurements in September 2025, both HarfBuzz & HarfRust got faster, but at a rate that made HarfRust fall further behind HarfBuzz in comparison.
In this work, proof-of-concept unsafe patch to font-codegen & read-fonts as well as removing bounds-checking from HarfRust buffer type show massive speedup benchmarks: from being 20% to 80% slower, down to being less than 10% slower.
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
"2025Q4 Fonts Quarterly": What I worked on so far this quarter: HarfBust solution, @HarfBuzz changes, logos, etc.
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
Thanks @googlefonts for financially supporting my work.
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
Evolution of @harfbuzz shaping speed over four years, for four benchmarks. Lower is better.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
In June, we announced HarfRust, a fully safe port of @HarfBuzz to Rust. At that time, HarfRust was 2x to 4x slower than HarfBuzz for a variety of benchmarks, so we have been working on addressing that.
Today, Chad Brokaw and I are pleased to present HarfRust 0.2.0, which is less than 25% slower than HarfBuzz, on both OpenType and AAT shaping benchmarks. We have also addressed all known correctness issues.
Charts:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
I wrote down what we were up to doing in font technology last quarter: "2025Q2 Fonts Quarterly"
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
@harfbuzz
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
On reddit @TheRealPomax asked what the biggest WTF moments of @harfbuzz development were for me. Here's my answer, a 🧵:
I'll get to the biggest WTF at the end, but first I want to provide multiple opportunity-meets-luck moments of development & adoption:
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
"@HarfBuzz Study: Subsetter"
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
"@HarfBuzz Study: Caching"
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
"2025Q1 Fonts Quarterly" is out: what I worked on in font technology (mostly HarfBuzz) land this past quarter:
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
cc @harfbuzz @FontTools
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
After years of procrastinating, I finally wrote some Rust code. Or rather, I asked Copilot and it wrote it for me.
Please welcome `hb-fontations`: Rust-based Fontations-based font-funcs for @harfbuzz . Mostly for (performance) testing.
github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
"HarfBuzz Study: hb-decycler"
I wrote down my DFS cycle-detection algorithm. I thought others might find it useful. #algorithms
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
A little tool that's instrumental to me removing all costly mallocs from HarfBuzz is my malloc-stats repo. There's a PR to make it work on Mac as well.
github.com/behdad/malloc-sta…
HarfBuzz—حرفباز retweeted
It occurred to me that "harfbuzz-ng", my rewrite of the shaper code that became known as current @harfbuzz, turned 18 years old on December 21st last year.
How it all started:
github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz…
