Emacs text shaping using Harfbuzz

From: Eli Zaretskii Subject: Emacs text shaping using Harfbuzz Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:39:19 +0200

Harfbuzz (harfbuzz.org) is an OpenType text shaping engine. It is a modern text shaping engine, is actively developed and maintained, and supports all the modern platforms which can run Emacs. Using Harfbuzz as its text shaping engine will thus allow Emacs to remain on the leading edge of this technology, and enjoy the advanced features that become available in other text-editing and reading applications, which currently Emacs cannot support. Moreover, we could have a single text shaping engine supported on all platforms, thus all but eliminating platform-specific text-shaping issues and limitations. With this in mind, we asked the Harfbuzz developers to help us integrate Emacs with Harfbuzz. The first stage of this job, performed by the Harfbuzz team, is the new 'harfbuzz' branch now available in the Emacs Git repository. This branch currently supports only Posix platforms, and AFAIK was only tested on GNU/Linux. Support for other platforms will be added as the development continues. (Interested individuals are, of course, welcome to work on adding their preferred platforms without waiting for others to do that.) I'd like to encourage people who build Emacs on GNU/Linux to checkout and build this branch and report any problems you see. Please report these problems using "M-x report-emacs-bug RET", and please CC on the reports Mohammad Nasirifar <address@hidden>, one of the Harfbuzz developers who volunteered to help us with this integration. (You will, of course, need to install or build Harfbuzz on your system, before building this branch.) I'd also like to encourage people to study the Harfbuzz integration code and propose improvements and other changes as you see fit. Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Harfbuzz development team (CC'ed) for their support. Enjoy.

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