Post #2204684

2026-03-05 12:29 UTC

@ebassi@mastodon.social @scaroo@floss.social Okay I think I get the gist of it now. Seems to convert the Latin alphabet into other languages outside the Latin alphabet in a way that tries to conform to our a standard way of writing/reading. I could be wrong but that's what I got of it. Thank you guys. So why the hell does that need AI?

Replies (3)

@ebassi@mastodon.social 2026-03-05 12:33

@retrimental@mastodon.social no, it does not convert "Latin alphabet" into other languages: it allows other languages to be drawn on screen. Imagine using arabic, and not being able to write a document with it; HarfBuzz is what made that possible on open source systems first, and now basically everywhere on the web. The primary author has been working on this for the past 25 years; recently he started using genAI to "code" a bunch of it. @scaroo@floss.social

Open ##2204685
@thing@plasmatrap.com 2026-03-05 20:37

@retrimental@mastodon.social @ebassi@mastodon.social @scaroo@floss.social That's the problem. It doesn't.

Open ##2204686
@smithkm@mastodon.social 2026-03-06 04:18

@retrimental@mastodon.social @ebassi@mastodon.social @scaroo@floss.social Simple fonts for certain scripts like Latin can just have one glyph for each Unicode character they cover and it will work. Advanced fonts are more complex and need to map sequences of characters onto sequences of glyphs. HarfBuzz takes the sequence of characters, the rules defined by the font standard, the rules and metadata defined in the font itself, and various other context and figures out which of the font's glyphs need to be used,

Open ##2204687