[HarfBuzz] Harfbuzz on Windows

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 03:04:16PM -0600, Bobby de Vos wrote:
> On 12-07-25 05:50 PM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > On 07/25/2012 07:18 PM, Samiullah Khawaja wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> What about uniscribe? Will it be able to replace the icu/glib dependency. I
> >> thought I can get rid of icu/glib dependency by using uniscribe. Is my
> >> assumption wrong? What does hb-uniscribe.cc file in harfbuzz-ng source do?
> > hb-uniscribe.cc is a backend delegating the whole shaping to the Windows DLL.
> >  With that, you don't need any Unicode callbacks whatsoever.
> >
> > It's not meant for production use, but it's actually not that bad.  Depends on
> > what your goals really are.
> 
> Do you have to be running Windows in order to run HarfBuzz tools like
> hb-view and hb-shape with a Uniscribe backend? Put another way, can
> HarfBuzz be compiled and run on Linux with a Uniscribe backend?

You can cross compile it for Windows under Linux and use it with WINE, I
do this and this how Behdad is using it as well, but you will need to
get a native Uniscribe DLL (usp10.dll), e.g. from Windows or Office
installation as there is no much point in testing against Wine's
implementation.

> My above question was for font development. If a font is being created,
> it would be great to render it with HarfBuzz OT, Uniscribe OT, and
> Graphite; to see if there are any differences. So the code that was
> developed for testing HarfBuzz OT rendering versus Uniscribe OT
> rendering might be helpful for font development, and not just for
> HarfBuzz OT development.

I use it for exactly that purpose.

Regards,
 Khaled