Part I. User's manual

Table of Contents

What is HarfBuzz?

What is text shaping?

Why do I need a shaping engine?

What does HarfBuzz do?

What HarfBuzz doesn't do

Why is it called HarfBuzz?

Installing HarfBuzz

Downloading HarfBuzz

Building HarfBuzz

Building on Linux

Building on Windows

Building on macOS

Configuration options

Getting started with HarfBuzz

An overview of the HarfBuzz shaping API

Terminology

A simple shaping example

Shaping concepts

Text shaping

Script-specific shaping

Shaping operations

Unicode character categories

Text runs

OpenType shaping models

Graphite shaping

AAT shaping

The HarfBuzz object model

An overview of data types in HarfBuzz

Objects in HarfBuzz

Object lifecycle management

User data

Blobs

Buffers, language, script and direction

Creating and destroying buffers

Adding text to the buffer

Setting buffer properties

Customizing Unicode functions

Fonts, faces, and output

Font and face objects

Customizing font functions

Font objects and HarfBuzz's native OpenType implementation

Working with OpenType Variable Fonts

Glyphs and rendering

Shaping and shape plans

Shaping and buffer output

OpenType features

Shaper selection

Plans and caching

Clusters

Clusters and shaping

Working with HarfBuzz clusters

A clustering example for levels 0 and 1

Reordering in levels 0 and 1

The distinction between levels 0 and 1

Level 2

Ligatures with combining marks in level 2

Reordering in level 2

Other considerations in level 2

Utilities

Command-line tools

hb-shape

hb-view

hb-subset

Common data types and APIs

Platform Integration Guide

GNOME integration, GLib, and GObject

FreeType integration

Cairo integration

Uniscribe integration

Core Text integration

ICU integration

Python bindings