Text shaping is the process of transforming a sequence of Unicode codepoints that represent individual characters (letters, diacritics, tone marks, numbers, symbols, etc.) into the orthographically and linguistically correct two-dimensional layout of glyph shapes taken from a specified font.

For some writing systems (or scripts) and languages, the process is simple, requiring the shaper to do little more than advance the horizontal position forward by the correct amount for each successive glyph.

But, for other scripts (often unceremoniously called complex scripts), any combination of several shaping operations may be required, and the rules for how and when they are applied vary from script to script. HarfBuzz and other shaping engines implement these rules.

The exact rules and necessary operations for a particular script constitute a shaping model. OpenType specifies a set of shaping models that covers all of Unicode. Other shaping models are available, however, including Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT).