harfbuzz_rs

harfbuzz_rs is a high-level interface to HarfBuzz, exposing its most important functionality in a safe manner using Rust.

What is HarfBuzz?

HarfBuzz is a library for performing complex text layout. It does not perform any drawing. This is quite a low-level operation. If you want to simply draw some text on the screen you should maybe choose another more high-level library. However if you want to build a library for drawing text on some canvas or need a lot of control on advanced text layout then this is the right library to use.

Getting Started

To shape a simple string of text you just create a Font from a font file, fill a Buffer with some text and call the shape function.

use harfbuzz_rs::*;

let path = "path/to/some/font_file.otf";
let index = 0; //< face index in the font file
let face = Face::from_file(path, index)?;
let mut font = Font::new(face);

let buffer = UnicodeBuffer::new().add_str("Hello World!");
let output = shape(&font, buffer, &[]);

// The results of the shaping operation are stored in the `output` buffer.

let positions = output.get_glyph_positions();
let infos = output.get_glyph_infos();

// iterate over the shaped glyphs
for (position, info) in positions.iter().zip(infos) {
    let gid = info.codepoint;
    let cluster = info.cluster;
    let x_advance = position.x_advance;
    let x_offset = position.x_offset;
    let y_offset = position.y_offset;

    // Here you would usually draw the glyphs.
    println!("gid{:?}={:?}@{:?},{:?}+{:?}", gid, cluster, x_advance, x_offset, y_offset);
}

This should print out something similar to the following:

gid41=0@741,0+0
gid70=1@421,0+0
gid77=2@258,0+0
gid77=3@253,0+0
gid80=4@510,0+0
gid1=5@227,0+0
gid56=6@874,0+0
gid80=7@498,0+0
gid83=8@367,0+0
gid77=9@253,0+0
gid69=10@528,0+0
gid2=11@276,0+0

Supported HarfBuzz versions

This crate is tested to work with harfbuzz versions 2.0 and higher. Older versions may work as well but not sure. I recommend statically linking the harfbuzz library provided by the harfbuzz-sys crate.

Optional Features

If you want to use rusttype as font functions enable the rusttype feature.