HarfBuzz 3.0 Released With Unicode 14.0 Support, More APIs Considered Stable

HarfBuzz 3.0 has been released as a new version of this widely-used, open-source text shaping library that is used by the major Linux desktop environments along with Chrome OS, Java, Android, Chrome, and a plethora of other software projects and UI toolkits.

Notable with HarfBuzz 3.0 is adding support for Unicode 14.0. Unicode 14.0 was released a few days ago and adds 838 more characters, including 37 new emoji characters. Among those new emoji with Unicode 14.0 are melting face, saluting face, heat hands, pregnant man, pregnant person, beans, and others. Those interested in the Unicode 14.0 changes by itself can see Unicode.org.

In addition to Unicode 14.0 support, the hb-subset API and harfbuzz-subset library API are declared stable. Additionally, the hb-style API is now considered stable.

More details on HarfBuzz 3.0 for those interested via the project's GitHub.