Behdad Esfahbod he / they /behˈ·dɒːd ɛs·fæhˈ·boːd/ ▶

I am Behdad Esfahbod (Persian: بهداد اسفهبد), a Software Engineer consultant, Free & Open Source Software enthusiast, and the author of HarfBuzz, a text shaping engine used across major operating systems, browsers, and apps worldwide. I was born and raised in Sari, Mazandaran, Iran, and moved to Toronto, Canada in 2003. Since then, I have lived in Menlo Park, CA and Seattle, WA, before moving to Edmonton, Canada.

I have been a Software Engineer at Facebook (internationalization team in Seattle), a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google leading fonts and text rendering, part of Red Hat’s desktop team in Toronto, and worked at FarsiWeb in Tehran, Iran.

My long-term goal since the late 1990s has been to make Persian work great in computer software, particularly in Free & Open Source Software. Since mid 2000s my focus extended beyond Persian and to international text rendering in general.

While not coding, I am interested in food, travel, photography, film-making, writing, leathercraft, mental health, hedonism, psychonautics, polyamory, and nontraditional lifestyles.

∞ The Iran incidence

In 2020 on a family visit to Iran, I was arrested, detained, and interrogated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for a week. I was released on bail under the condition that I would spy on Iranian activists abroad for them. I left Iran and made this public later that year. This caused me a full mental breakdown, which I have been recovering from since. I have written that account in detail here.

∞ Whitepapers & presentations

∞ Software projects I actively develop & co-maintain

• HarfBuzz — the text shaping engine and font platform
• FontTools — a library to manipulate font files from Python

∞ Software projects I have developed & maintained in the past

• GLyphy — high-quality text rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders
• Pango — GNOME’s Unicode text rendering library
• Fontconfig — library for font customization and configuration
• FriBidi — an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm
• Cairo — graphics library
• gucharmap — the GNOME Unicode character map
• vte — the GNOME terminal emulation widget
• The FarsiTeX Project — a Persian LaTeX typesetting system
• The FarsiWeb Project — a Persian Free Software task force
• The Fedora Project — my favorite Linux distribution
• The GNOME Project — more about my GNOME involvement here

∞ Persian content

• RiRa Persian Digital Library — With Pooya Karimian, source available
• Khaateraat-e Yek Asb — by Yar-Ali PourMoghaddam, produced (by permission)
• The Little Prince — translated to Persian by Ahmad Shamlou (with audio)
• The Little Brother — by Cory Doctorow, Persian translation by [name withheld]
• Behdad's Editor — with open & save functionality
• Behdad's Calendar — multi-system calendar used in Iran
• Persian Computing — community

∞ Collaborators

• Markéta Jakešová — writing & film associate, & and partner in crime
• Asal Andarzipour — font design & film associate
• Mania Akbari — film associate

∞ Archived

• Résumé — software engineering — last updated 2014
• McEs, A Hacker Life — technical blog — last updated 2015
• Behdad's Editor — the classic version
• Farsi — a relic of the past

∞ Contact

Email: behdad [at] behdad [dot] org