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I use it extensively to preserve images and formatting, in the pageless layout. I haven't tested it much with tables. Give it a try and file issues if it doesn't work well and I'll pass on to my agents. Thanks!

Good question, isn't it? GDocs has a "publish to web" feature, but it's vastly broken and loses formatting and image sizing and everything. It's just not priority for Google.

Possibly. I wasn't determined enough to look into that. Plus, it's easier for me to batch download my documents from the terminal.

Note that it will be a HTML plus directory of images, so you need to return an archive.


Thanks. :)

Yeah this is not the main wedding invitation. There's a proper HTML with details. This is extra me going wild with the agents fun side. If we were to expect people to finish this to get to the RSVP, we'd have exactly two guests!


msdf still suffers from detail loss at large sizes, which this method doesn't have.


Thanks, how large of a size? And at lower sizes, what's the performance/quality like? Is this the silver bullet?


A wave of manic energy in December had me put together a long deck called "HarfBuzz at 20! " , celebrating 20 years of HarfBuzz.

I designed the deck to be presented at the #WebEnginesHackfest later this year. Then reality hit that I cannot present this deck in any sane amount of time.

I decided that instead of tossing the deck out, I just out to be read by the curious. I will present a highly condensed version at the hackfest in June.

Let me know what you think.


I have a puzzle for the hacker in you: The font HarfBust.ttf is an offshoot of Anton Regular, with a twist:

  - On software using HarfBuzz (as far back as you go, back to the 2000s) and HarfBuzz only, it will ligate "HarfBuzz" to the HarfBuzz logo.

  - On software using HarfRust and HarfRust only, it will ligate "HarfRust" to the HarfBuzz logo.

  - On software using HarfBuzz, HarfRust, or DirectWrite, but not CoreText, it will ligate "HarfBust" to the HarfBuzz logo.
How does this work? The font does not use any non-standard OpenType features like `HARF`/`Harf`/`BUZZ`/`Buzz` (which HarfBuzz / HarfRust apply).

Enjoy, --behdad


We’re the maintainers of HarfBuzz, the open-source text shaping engine used by browsers, operating systems, and applications to render all text, including supporting scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, Khmer, CJK, and more.

HarfBuzz is known for being fast, portable, and complete. But it’s also sometimes seen as hard to understand or work with. We’re working on a Developer FAQ and Design Notes to clear up misconceptions and explain the "why" behind our more unusual design decisions (yes, the macros are intentional).

So we’re asking:

What was your biggest WTF moment reading or using HarfBuzz?

Other things we’d love to hear about:

* Which parts felt like magic or a black box? * What do you think we could explain better? * Have you run into performance or integration surprises? * Are there features you only discovered by reading the source? * What do you wish the documentation had told you?

Anything else you want to know about the project?

We'll answer questions on Reddit, here, and also open a GitHub Discussion afterward to collect and respond to feedback more formally and integrate into our documentation.

Thanks in advance for your curiosity, stories, or frustration—we’re listening!


I'd like to know what is the future of font rendering (according to you) as far the as the quality of the result is concerned (iow, my question is not about speed). For example, are there new way to handle antialiasing or is it a solved problem ?


Thank you for the question. Rasterization is not my specialty. There definitely is still immense amount of research going into rasterizing fonts and 2D graphics on the GPU efficiently. Here's the latest from Raph Levien's research for example:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8K190Zps


Thanks, so that video (wasn't much impressed, just some "tile compression").

My question was more about the quality of the rendering (or other challenges) than about the speed of rendering.


Browser zoom works fine for me. Does it not for you?


The page fights against zooming by reducing the text size to compensate.

I can zoom in somewhat only if I press Ctrl + fast enough many times in succession, but then it is easy to overshoot.


Interesting, when I zoom in to 300% the T in TLDR is exactly 3x taller than when at 100%. Seems to be an embedded Google Doc though so the canvas does a weird recentering jerk on viewport size changes.


Zoom works until the page width is about the browser width. After that it starts fighting your zoom level.


Hi. As mentioned, I'll expand on my motivations in a future paper. -behdad


While this presentation is extremely interesting, it would have been far more useful if you would have exported this view into a downloadable PDF file, instead of giving access to just this ephemeral preview.


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