Part I. User's manual

Table of Contents

What is HarfBuzz?

What is text shaping?
Why do I need a shaping engine?
What does HarfBuzz do?
What HarfBuzz doesn't do
Why is it called HarfBuzz?

Installing HarfBuzz

Downloading HarfBuzz

Building HarfBuzz

Building on Linux
Building on Windows
Building on macOS
Configuration options

Getting started with HarfBuzz

An overview of the HarfBuzz shaping API
Terminology
A simple shaping example

Shaping concepts

Text shaping
Script-specific shaping
Shaping operations
Unicode character categories
Text runs
OpenType shaping models
Graphite shaping
AAT shaping

The HarfBuzz object model

An overview of data types in HarfBuzz
Objects in HarfBuzz
Object lifecycle management
User data
Blobs

Buffers, language, script and direction

Creating and destroying buffers
Adding text to the buffer
Setting buffer properties
Customizing Unicode functions

Fonts, faces, and output

Font and face objects
Customizing font functions
Font objects and HarfBuzz's native OpenType implementation
Working with OpenType Variable Fonts
Glyphs and rendering

Shaping and shape plans

Shaping and buffer output
OpenType features
Shaper selection
Plans and caching

Clusters and shaping

Working with HarfBuzz clusters

A clustering example for levels 0 and 1

Reordering in levels 0 and 1

The distinction between levels 0 and 1

Ligatures with combining marks in level 2
Reordering in level 2
Other considerations in level 2

Command-line tools

hb-shape
hb-view
hb-subset

Common data types and APIs

Platform Integration Guide

GNOME integration, GLib, and GObject
FreeType integration
Cairo integration
Uniscribe integration
Core Text integration
ICU integration
Python bindings