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  The 'boring-expansion' set of proposals that I made back in 2022, with the help of Google Fonts and industry colleagues, have finally become part of the new ISO Open Font Format 5th edition international font format standard. It _only_ took four years... The proposals include the `avar` version 2 table for more expressive variable font designspaces, variable-composites, as well as fonts with more than 65 thousand glyphs. PDF can be downloaded for free, albeit after a checkout p...

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  RE: https://typo.social/@triple/117419027672718120 I'm flattered to having made it to this list. Needless to say, my work on HarfBuzz in the past twenty years has been collaboration with dozens of colleagues, and generously funded by Google, to which I'm grateful.

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  #HarfBuzz 12.0.0 is released with Variable Composites / Components (`VARC` table) technology enabled by default. Read more: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/releases/tag/12.0.0

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  Update on the Slug algorithm Open Source implementation: I absorbed GLyphy into a new HarfBuzz module called hb-gpu. Check out the web demo. Interact with it with the mouse. Or press space to animation rotation: https://behdad.org/hb-gpu-demo Discuss hb-gpu at: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/pull/5878

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  RE: https://typo.social/@behdad/116247460216755113 And... I have a patchset to change GLyphy to use the Slug algorithm & shaders. Runs >2.5x faster than GLyphy, without any of the rendering artifacts. https://github.com/behdad/glyphy/pull/62

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  Do you build avar2 variable fonts? I would appreciate your help testing the fonttools partial-instancing (aka designspace-limiting) PR at https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools/pull/4045

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  OpenType Variable Fonts tech was released on September 14, 2016. Many downplayed its adoption in the following years, or even called it a failure. Early on, I shared my vision that in ten years time we will see variable-fonts just be the standard font format in use, the same way that scalable fonts replaced bitmap fonts. Ten years have passed, and at least to me, when I look around, it seems like most new font families are designed variable-first. Is that accurate to say? That sounds like wides...

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  A wave of manic energy in December had me put together a long deck called "HarfBuzz at 20! " , celebrating 20 years of HarfBuzz. 🎂 I designed the deck to be presented at the #WebEnginesHackfest later this year. Then reality hit that I cannot present this deck in any sane amount of time. Inspired by all the great presentations coming out of #FOSDEM today, I decided that instead of tossing the deck out, I just put it out here to be read by the curious. I will present a highly c...

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  I'd like to share with you the "State of Text Rendering 2024", a survey of the Free & Open Source fonts & text rendering landscape advancements since 2009. https://behdad.org/text2024/

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  Great news today for GPU-accelerated text rendering: """ I was granted a patent for the Slug algorithm in 2019, and I legally have exclusive rights to it until the year 2038. But I think that’s too long. The patent has already served its purpose well, and I believe that holding on to it any longer benefits nobody. Therefore, effective today, I am permanently and irrevocably dedicating the Slug patent to the public domain. ... To aid in implementations of the Slug alg...

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  RE: https://typo.social/@behdad/116172838540880597 I'll spare you my rambling thoughts. If someone wants to fork HarfBuzz 12.3.2, go ahead, that's before AI "slop". I let @khaled, the HarfBuzz maintainer, decide whether AI-assisted code is allowed in the upstream HarfBuzz or not. As for code quality, I'm ultimately the only one responsible for code that I push out. Finally, if this technology is good for Linus, Guido, and Knuth, among others, I&#3...

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  @dysfun I was busy with other projects: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/3db272507d23e2335bdd2c30903f466452edd344/NEWS#L155-L173

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  RE: https://typo.social/@fontra/116183028572020334 This is quite an interesting and clever way to use #HarfBuzz to do shaping on the fly.

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  Calling on all downstream projects (browsers, Linux distros, etc) to share their thoughts on AI contribution policy for HarfBuzz: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/5790

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  HarfBuzz 13 ships with the new `hb-raster` library. You might ask why yet another Open Source rasterizer when there are many high-quality ones available. `hb-raster` fills two gaps in the Open Source font rasterization scene: 1. Many graphics-oriented frameworks & mobile apps don't want to include the entirety of FreeType to get gain text rendering. Many resort to `stb_truetype`, which doesn't support variable fonts, and crashes on bad font data. `hb-raster` addresses b...