Post #2204681
2026-03-05 12:15 UTC
Replies (3)
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@scaroo@floss.social 2026-03-05 12:18
@retrimental@mastodon.social @ebassi@mastodon.social Can't really help you. HarfBuzz, Freetype, the toolkits and their responsabilities and interactions are a mystery to me. But I know that half the world (GTK, Qt, Chrome, Firefox and many others) depends on it for displaying text.
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@ebassi@mastodon.social 2026-03-05 12:21
@retrimental@mastodon.social it turns text into individual elements that can be mapped to individual shapes that can then be rendered. Latin is somewhat simple (if you ignore ligature marks and things like word breaks), but it gets really complicated for other, non-western writing systems @scaroo@floss.social
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@rubdos@mastodon.social 2026-03-05 18:38
@retrimental@mastodon.social @scaroo@floss.social @ebassi@mastodon.social My understanding from quickly reading https://harfbuzz.github.io/what-is-harfbuzz.html, is that it takes a Unicode string and font, figures out which drawing (glyph) to take from the font, and in which order, and returns that sequence. It basically takes "48 45 4C 4C 4F" and replies "take an H, then an E, then an L ... and that's how you draw HELLO".