[HarfBuzz] Using HarfBuzz to get final glyphs

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hello again,

Reading my own reply again after a few good hours of sleep, I'm afraid
it didn't exactly reflect my concerns about the project or my attitude
against other Free Software hackers.  I'll excuse for that.

So yeah, summary is: 1) current code is not documented because it was
handed down to us as a big lump with no docs whatsoever, 2) eventually,
HarfBuzz will become a shaping library that is encouraged to be used by
all desktop publishing projects, at which point it will be fully
documented and properly advertised, 3) at this time, I'm busy with other
work, and with finishing my new design for the OpenType layout engine,
then I will look into cleaning up the shapers and merging Pango's
shapers into the new framework.  These should take a year or two to get
us to a stable reusable API.

Regards,

behdad

On Fri, 2008-03-21 at 15:23 +0430, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 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
> 
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759