Fedora 34 Planning For Better Font Rendering By Enabling HarfBuzz In FreeType

One of the latest planned changes to the long list of improvements for Fedora 34 is enabling the HarfBuzz support within the FreeType library.

Fedora plans to flip on the HarfBuzz text shaping engine support with the FreeType font rasterization engine. In doing so, this should yield improved hinting of glyphs especially with languages that need more complicated text shaping. FreeType has supported HarfBuzz for more than a half-decade (after HarfBuzz was originally was born out of that project) while Fedora hasn't enabled its usage until the planned change for Fedora 34 this spring.

Improving the most with this change is for the hinting of glyphs that are composed of multiple characters.

FESCo still needs to sign-off on the change but details on the switch can be found via the Fedora Wiki.