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

Complex scripts

Shaping operations

Unicode character categories

Text runs

OpenType shaping models

Graphite shaping

AAT shaping

Buffers, language, script and direction

Creating and destroying buffers

Adding text to the buffer

Setting buffer properties

What about the other scripts?

Customizing Unicode functions

Fonts and faces

Using FreeType

Using HarfBuzz's native OpenType implementation

Using your own font functions

Clusters

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

Level 2

Ligatures with combining marks in level 2

Reordering in level 2

Other considerations in level 2

Shaping and shape plans

OpenType features

Plans and caching