HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others.
Making HarfBuzz 11.3 quite exciting are a number of performance improvements. The new HarfBuzz 11.3 release speeds up handling of fonts with very large number of variations. Drawing can be up to 40% faster, calculating glyph extents up to 15% faster, and getting horizontal glyph advances up to 45% faster.
HarfBuzz 11.3 also speeds up horizontal and vertical glyph advances by up to 24%. Vertical text shaping is also significantly faster.
Rounding out the release are build improvements, subsetting enhancements, improvements to Rust font functions, and various new APIs.
More details on the HarfBuzz 11.3 changes via GitHub. HarfBuzz 11.3.1 and 11.3.2 also were released as delivering some immediate fixes.
