What's Changed

• New, experimental, WebAssembly (WASM) shaper, that provides greater flexibility over OpenType/AAT/Graphite shaping, using WebAssembly embedded inside the font file. Currently WASM shaper is disabled by default and needs
  to be enabled at build time. For details, see:

  https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/main/docs/wasm-shaper.md

  For example fonts making use of the WASM shaper, see:

  https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples

• Improvements to Experimental features introduced in earlier releases:

  • Support for subsetting beyond-64k and VarComposites fonts.
  • Support for instancing variable fonts with cubic “glyf” table.

• Many big speed optimizations:

  • Up to 89% speedup loading variable fonts for shaping.
  • Up to 88% speedup in small subsets of large (eg. CJK) fonts (both TTF and OTF), essential for Incremental Font Transfer (IFT).
  • Over 50% speedup in loading Roboto font for shaping.
  • Up to 40% speed up in loading (sanitizing) complex fonts.
  • 30% speed up in shaping Gulzar font.
  • Over 25% speedup in glyph loading Roboto font.
  • 10% speed up loading glyph shapes in VarComposite Hangul font.
  • hb-hashmap optimizations & hashing improvements.

• New macro HB_ALWAYS_INLINE. HarfBuzz now inlines functions more aggressively, which results in some speedup at the expense of bigger code size. To disable this feature define the macro to just inline.

• New API:
  +HB_CODEPOINT_INVALID
  +hb_ot_layout_get_baseline2()
  +hb_ot_layout_get_baseline_with_fallback2()
  +hb_ot_layout_get_font_extents()
  +hb_ot_layout_get_font_extents2()
  +hb_subset_input_set_axis_range()

New Contributors

• @fanc999-1 made their first contribution in #4240
• @arch1t3cht made their first contribution in #4299
• @aelmahmoudy made their first contribution in #4301

Full Changelog: 7.3.0...8.0.0