HarfBuzz 5.0 Released With Progress On Supporting The "Boring Expansion" Font Spec

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HarfBuzz 5.0 Released With Progress On Supporting The "Boring Expansion" Font Spec

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-5.0-Released

[tildearrow]

These extensions + Unifont = First 100 thousand+ glyph font in existence

[Sin2x]

HarfBuzz did not even exist a decade ago so it can hardly be called critical for Linux desktop. It's just Red Hat/IBM trying to exercise control over the open source world. Again. As usual.

[cl333r]

From article:

to overcome Open Font Format's limitation of 65k glyphs per file

Because internally they're using an unsigned short (u16) for this? If so ain't it premature optimization or a rookie mistake to use only 2 bytes to count something?

[timofonic]

Why boring? Does this mean unicode fonts with ALL Unicode spectrum will arise?

[jacob]

HarfBuzz did not even exist a decade ago so it can hardly be called critical for Linux desktop. It's just Red Hat/IBM trying to exercise control over the open source world. Again. As usual.

Correct font rendering is critical for any desktop. That Linux didn't even have it 10 years ago only shows how bad it was.

[evil_core]

Correct font rendering is critical for any desktop. That Linux didn't even have it 10 years ago only shows how bad it was.

It doesn't proof anything
Linux had FreeType, Pango, etc libraries from long ago

Many hates HarfBuzz, because of valid reasons:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Pango-No-More-Bitmap-Fonts

It came out of nowhere and caused that most GTK apps didn't rendered text at all, if old-school bitmap fonts were selected...it really broke current setups....

[jacob]

It doesn't proof anything
Linux had FreeType, Pango, etc libraries from long ago

Many hates HarfBuzz, because of valid reasons:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Pango-No-More-Bitmap-Fonts

It came out of nowhere and caused that most GTK apps didn't rendered text at all, if old-school bitmap fonts were selected...it really broke current setups....

Freetype and Pango are different things, HarfBuzz doesn't replace those. Your "valid" reasons only actually prove my point: still relying on bitmap fonts in the 2010s was bad enough, expecting them to have first class support in the 2020s is ridiculous. Also:

1. If you read your own link you will see that it's Pango, not HarfBuzz, that (at last) deprecated them;
2. Is it really a drama if you need to change once the fonts you selected some time in 1995?

[jabl]

Freetype and Pango are different things, HarfBuzz doesn't replace those.

Well, in a way it does. Per wikipedia and LWN Harfbuzz got started by splitting out the font shaping functionality from Freetype, Pango and Qt into a separate library. Of course, that was a long time ago, and Harfbuzz has apparently gone through a from-scratch rewrite in the meantime ("new Harfbuzz"), and I'm sure the old font shaping code in Freetype and Pango has been ripped out as well.

By all accounts, Harfbuzz is a smashing success, and is widely used also outside the FOSS desktop stack (e.g. Android, Chrome) where Freetype and Pango are not seen.

[microcode]

HarfBuzz did not even exist a decade ago so it can hardly be called critical for Linux desktop. It's just Red Hat/IBM trying to exercise control over the open source world. Again. As usual.

...what? Like, half the world's languages can't even be displayed legibly without shaping. HarfBuzz is invoked in just about every graphical application on the Linux desktop.