HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library.
HarfBuzz 14.0 released today with the new libharfbuzz-gpu library that supports GPU-based text rasterization via the Slug algorithm. The GPU handles decoding and rasterizing directly in the fragment shader. This initial HarfBuzz GPU library supports GLSL shaders as well as WGSL, Metal MSL, and HLSL shaders for broad support.
In addition to the library itself, HarfBuzz 14.0 now ships with a new utility called hb-gpu for demonstrating interactive GPU text rendering with this new code path.
There is also a interactive live web demo for GPU-accelerated text rendering on the web using either WebGPU or WebGL.
That’s the main highlight of the new HarfBuzz 14.0 release for this widely-used text shaping engine library on the Linux desktop and many other applications/platforms. Downloads and all the details over on GitHub.
