#HarfBuzz 8.0.0 is out, with a new experimental #WebAssembly shaper, and a plethora of speed-ups.

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/releases/tag/8.0.0

One week ago, I gave my talk about #DigitalTypesetting. Main points were:

(1) Digital typesetting is difficult; has many requirements; some originate from manual typesetting
(2) There are plenty of standards to follow. #Unicode is [for me personally the most important] one.
(3) #HarfBuzz is an important component. I presented the #hyphenation algorithm with slides by @frischefarbe

1/2

Since this version of harfbuzz seems to be current, i have reported this at https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/4051

#HarfBuzz

Ah, f-word, it seem to be a bug in harfbuzz 6.0.0

It is truncating wide glyphs on the right, at the right-hand end of lines.

This is ‰ displayed using overpass-regular.otf from https://overpassfont.org/

#HarfBuzz

#SILE is getting #VariableFonts support, using #HarfBuzz for both layout and for instanciating fonts before embedding in PDF.

https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/pull/1672

TIL you can find the #HarfBuzz version used in Adobe Photoshop from “Help → System Info”. Too bad Adobe Illustrator doesn’t do the same.

The PDF support is a bit of a hack, though, it uses #HarfBuzz draw API to convert the glyphs into vector drawings and embed them in PDF Type 3 fonts. Proper instantiation is waiting for the HarfBuzz instancing API to be become stable.

I just merged a #LibreOffice change to fix glyph positioning when applying artificial/synthetic/fake/faux italic. This is especially relevant for #Arabic since many Arabic typefaces doesn’t include italic/slanted fonts.

This is using #HarfBuzz API to apply synthetic italic to the font, which also takes care of transforming glyph positioning.

I just merged a #LibreOffice change to fix glyph positioning when applying artificial/synthetic/fake/faux italic. This is especially relevant for #Arabic since many Arabic typefaces doesn’t include italic/slanted fonts.

This is using #HarfBuzz API to apply synthetic italic to the font, which also takes care of transforming glyph positioning.