HarfBuzz 4.0 Released For This Open-Source Text Shaping Library

The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Java, Flutter, Firefox, LibreOffice, and numerous other applications and toolkits is out with HarfBuzz 4.0.

HarfBuzz 4.0 is a major update to this project that is critical to the Linux desktop. While it's not exciting to end-users directly, it is vital to the open-source desktop. HarfBuzz 4.0 changes include:

- The draw API for extracting glyph shapes has been extended and is no longer treated as experimental.

- The HarfBuzz hb-view tool will now use the draw API for rendering glyphs in place of Cairo. The hb-view and hb-shape tools also now use their own font loading code rather than the FreeType functions.

- Support for more than 65,535 glyph shapes and metrics.

- A new public API for creating a subset plan and gathering information on areas like glyph mappings in the final subset.

- Various other new APIs added.

More details on the HarfBuzz 4.0 changes can be found via the project's GitHub repository.