[HarfBuzz] Using HarfBuzz to get final glyphs

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi all,

So here's my short note trying to clear up some confusion spread over
this thread.

I need to back up a bit:  When the FTLayout code was orphaned by
FreeType, both Pango and Qt made internal copies on it.  Then a couple
years ago I worked with Qt developers (Lars and Simon) and merged the
code back together and we dumped it in a shared repo on fd.o, for the
sake of sharing and not diverging again.  For a long while, there was
even no build system.  No nothing.  Just a piece of code that is not
really useful on its own.  Then Qt added their shaper stuff to it and
made it look like kind of a standalone project.

As for examples, there's Qt, and there's Pango.  I imagine no one had a
hard time figuring out that those two successfully use HarfBuzz.  If you
want a 100 line sample, sorry, no such thing exists, and without the
shaper API (that Pango doesn't use), can never exist.  Some things are
just not that simple.  You need at least 200 lines of glue code to drive
HarfBuzz with FreeType...

As for HarfBuzz developers not expecting other projects to use HarfBuzz,
that's wrong too.  We want to make HarfBuzz the single one shaping
solution on Free Software systems.  That's why we are totally rewriting
it with sane APIs and what not.

And for people demanding that us more clearly say on the wiki page that
it's not for them, I couldn't put it any more clear there: "There are no
releases available for download yet, and currently there are no releases
scheduled, as the main audience of the code is developers of text
rendering engines and currently the recommended way to use the code is
to copy it into your project."  The license also says:
THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS
ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER HAS NO OBLIGATION TO
PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS."
Or is reading licenses not cool anymore?

The part about someone asking us to do Apple Events because he doesn't
know how to do it was so outrageous.  But I think I can ignore this
thread and go back to finishing my layout engine rewrite.

Yes, I'm a bit pissed off having to spend my vacation time here in Iran
replying to this...

behdad