What is "harfbuzz"

HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian harf-bāz, meaning "Opentype") is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. The newest version, New HarfBuzz, targets various font technologies while the first version, Old HarfBuzz, targeted only OpenType fonts. New HarfBuzz provides only text shaping functions and not text layout or rendering, which require other libraries. Pango, which incorporates HarfBuzz, can be used for higher-level text layout, and FreeType or Anti-Grain Geometry for text rendering.

The goals for New HarfBuzz, as set by the developers, are for HarfBuzz to be beautiful, robust, flexible, efficient, and portable. Some potential applications that are a good fit for HarfBuzz are: graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits, web browsers, word processors, designer tools, font design tools, terminal emulators, batch document processors, and TeX engines.