HarfBuzz 1.8 was released on Tuesday, the same day as the Unicode 11 release. HarfBuzz is the text shaping library born out of the FreeType project that is now widely used across many applications from Firefox to Inkscape and Java.

The only prominent change over HarfBuzz 1.7.7, which was also released yesterday, is HarfBuzz 1.8.0 adds Unicode 11 support.

Unicode 11.0 was released yesterday with 684 new characters and seven new scripts and 66 new emoji characters. Those curious about all the new emoji, various new symbols, and language improvements with Unicode 11.0, all of the details can be found at Unicode.org.