HarfBuzz

HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian calque حرف‌باز harf-bāz, literally "open type")^[3][4] is a software library for supporting text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. The newer version, New HarfBuzz (2012–), targets various font technologies while the first version, Old HarfBuzz (2006–2012), targeted only OpenType fonts.^[3][5]

HarfBuzz
Original author(s)	The FreeType Project
Developer(s)	Behdad Esfahbod, Khaled Hosny[1]
Stable release	12.0.0[2]  (27 September 2025; 1 day ago (27 September 2025)) [±]
Repository	github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz
Written in	C++
Operating system	Unix-like, Windows
Type	Software development library
License	MIT
Website	harfbuzz.github.io

History

Behdad Esfahbod, developer of HarfBuzz

HarfBuzz evolved from code that was originally part of the FreeType project. It was then developed separately in Qt and Pango. Then it was merged back into a common repository with an MIT license. This was Old HarfBuzz, which is no longer being developed, as the path going forward is New HarfBuzz.^[3] In 2013, Behdad Esfahbod won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for his work on HarfBuzz.^[6]

Important milestones for New HarfBuzz include:

• 0.9.2, SIL Graphite support
• 1.0 includes Universal Shaping Engine concepts from Microsoft
• 1.4 with OpenType font variation support
• 1.6 with Unicode 10 support
• 1.8 with Unicode 11 support
• 2.0 with Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) shaping support.^{[7][8][9][10][11]}
• 2.1 with color fonts support and improved major AAT Shaping features.
• 2.4 Unicode 12 support
• 2.6.7 Unicode 13 support
• 3.0 stable font subsetter API, Unicode 14 support^[12]
• 4.0 more than 65536 Glyphs and metrics supported^[13]
• 4.3 major speed up^[14]
• 5.0 BE Fonts support^[15]
• 5.2 Unicode 15 support^[16]
• 7.0 introduced new APIs, new command-line utility, font emboldening support and reduced memory usage^[17]
• 8.0 introduced support for using WebAssembly-based shaper embedded in fonts^[18]

Users

Most applications don't use HarfBuzz directly, but use a UI toolkit library that integrates with it.

HarfBuzz is used by the UI libraries of:

• GNOME (GTK)
• KDE (Qt)
• ChromeOS (Skia)
• PlayStation 4^[19]
• Android^[3]
• Java^[20]
• Flutter^[21]
• Godot (since version 4.0)^[22][23]
• Unity (since version 6.0)^[24]
• OpenHarmony (HarmonyOS)^[25]

HarfBuzz is used directly by many applications, including:

• Chromium
• Firefox
• LibreOffice (from version 4.1 on Linux only,^[26] from 5.3 on all platforms^[27])
• Scribus (since version 1.5.3)^[28]
• Inkscape
• Adobe Photoshop (since version 23.0^[29])
• Adobe InDesign (when using World Ready Composer since InDesign 19.0^[30])
• Figma^[31][32]
• XeTeX (since version 0.9999)^[33][34]
• LuaTeX (since version 1.11.1)^[35][36]
• QuarkXPress^[37]

See also

• Free Software portal

• Graphite (smart font technology), a programmable Unicode-compliant smart-font technology and rendering system developed by SIL International
• Uniscribe and DirectWrite, APIs that provide similar functionality on the Microsoft Windows platform.
• Core Text, API provides similar functionality on macOS (HarfBuzz can be used instead of it on macOS also)