[HarfBuzz] harfbuzz-ng progress report

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> As promised, here's a more detailed report.  CC'ing HarfBuzz list actually.
> 
> In April, I talked to my managers and they agreed to put me back on
> working on HarfBuzz for a while.  I started getting back to the code and
> continuing my layout engine rewrite.
> 
> At LGM Jonathan and I sat down and checked the code together, we then
> reviewed Pango's shaper APIs, current HarfBuzz shaping API, and
> expressed our designs, needs, and concerns (for Pango, Mozilla, XeTeX,
> etc).  We believe we have a great design in mind in term of APIs which
> I'll start putting together soon and Jonathan will join me in filling in
> the bits.
> 
> In the mean time, I finished my layout engine rewrite.  A few minutes
> ago, I removed the old code.  It's all in pango's git repo in the
> harfbuzz-ng branch.  Gone is 16k lines of code which parsed the OpenType
> tables in memory. Replacement is 6k lines that uses mmap()ed fonts. 
> Sanitization is still not implemented, so there's a bit more to do.  But
> the code already does more than the old one.  And IranNastaliq and other
> complex fonts I tested render correctly.

Great news!

Thanks again the work in this area.

> Plans forward is:
> 
>   - Next week: I'll finish the layout rewrite.  Adding sanity-checking
> code.  May add stubs for BASE and JSTF tables too.
> 
>   - June: I'll start building the highlevel HarfBuzz API and prototyping
> the implementation, with Latin and Arabic only initially.  Jonathan will
> hopefully join me in bringing Indic shapers together and filling in the
> rest of the shapers.
> 
>   - July first half: I'll be at GUADEC, talking about this and minor
> hacking.
> 
>   - July second half and August: I'll be pulling things together to ship
> next Pango stable version with an internal copy of the new HarfBuzz. 
> Hopefully making the release stable and push out as a separate shared
> library early 2010.
> 
>   - Profit!

Looking forward to all that!


> Cheers,
> behdad


Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org



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