[HarfBuzz] HarfBuzz HackFest report

[Ed Trager]

Hi, Behdad,

That's very exciting news!  I also looked at Jonathan Kew's stuff on
using advanced OpenType features in the Firefox beta -- very cool!
I'm glad to see all the progress being made.  Keep up the good work!

Best - Ed

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Here's what I blogged today:
>
> Here is a quick update re HarfBuzz
> <http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz>:
>
> During May and August I finished rewriting the OpenType Layout engine to
> use mmap()ed font files. This is in Pango 1.26.x already. Pango and
> fontconfig also received a lot more optimization love. That deserves a
> long and separate blogpost. The net result is that the text stack's
> *memory usage is considerably lower* now. *All this goodness will be in
> the upcoming Fedora 12*.
>
> In October, I attended the 33rd Internationalization and Unicode
> Conference <http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz> in San Jose
> to present the free software text stack (slides
> <http://behdad.org/download/Presentations/slippy/freetextstack_slides.pdf>)
> as well as present and promote HarfBuzz (slides
> <http://behdad.org/download/Presentations/slippy/harfbuzz_slides.pdf>).
> That was a very fruitful event and I received lots of interest from many
> major industry players. With the liberal license that we are releasing
> HarfBuzz under, we expect broad adoption, which is exactly what we are
> looking for.
>
> This week, Jonathan Kew and myself are having a small HarfBuzz HackFest
> here in Mozilla's Toronto office. Here's what we have got done so far:
>
>     * Jonathan has a version of Firefox using harfbuzz-ng (the codename
>       for the rewrite) that has advanced layout features controlable
>       through CSS. Very very cool stuff. He updated it to the latest
>       harfbuzz-ng code.
>
>     * I ripped harfbuzz-ng out of the Pango tree and into a standalone
>       module. Finally! Took a couple hours of git surgery plus ten
>       minutes to put together an autotools build system. Git clone URL
>       is this <git://git.freedesktop.org/~behdad/harfbuzz-ng>. The
>       harfbuzz-ng-external branch in Pango uses that as an external
>       module. The plan is to reach a stable 1.0 release of harfbuzz-ng
>       before next stable GNOME and most probably, Pango will require
>       harfbuzz unconditionally (that is, on all platforms). Note that
>       harfbuzz is NOT tied to FreeType, so you can use it with any
>       rasterizer you have around.
>
>     * We fixed all portability issues Jonathan had faced when compiling
>       harfbuzz-ng with MSVC.
>
>     * Jonathan is working on the shaper side, while I'm working on the
>       API and pulling it all together.
>
>     * I added glue code for using harfbuzz-ng with glib, ICU, and FreeType.
>
>     * Lots of API and design review.
>
> At the rate this is developing, by the end of the week we should have
> basic shaper (Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, ...) and Arabic+Syriac working
> perfectly and tackling Indic family. We're closer to 1.0 than you may
> think!
>
> --
> Posted By behdad to McEs, A Hacker Life
> <http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/11/harfbuzz-hackfest.html> at 11/04/2009
> 11:55:00 AM
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