Behdad Esfahbod
Old update 2020-08-17: "If you read one thing from me, please be this".
My name is Behdad. It's roughly pronounced as
[beh da:d] [es f@h bo:d]
in IPA ASCII transcription.
It is a Persian name, natively written as
بهداد اسفهبد.
I was born and grew up in Iran, and moved to Canada in 2003.
Previous, I was a Software Engineer at the Facebook
internationalization team in Seattle.
Before that, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google,
leading fonts and text rendering, in Mountain View, Toronto, and Waterloo.
Before that I was part of the Red Hat's desktop team,
working from Toronto.
And before I was at FarsiWeb
in Iran.
I am a
Free Software
enthusiast and developer, and previously worked on the GNOME Project.
My long-term goal since late last century has been to make Persian work great
in computer software, in particular, in
Free Software, though
these days my focus is not limited to Persian anymore.
I'm best known as the author of HarfBuzz,
which makes it possible to read every language of the world on software like
Firefox, Google Chrome, Android, Linux desktop, and elsewhere.
More about me:
-
GitHub,
Mastodon,
Twitter,
Instagram,
LinkedIn,
Medium
Facebook,
YouTube,
Vimeo,
Google Maps,
CouchSurfing,
Google+,
Ohloh,
Flickr,
Wikipedia,
-
Old Résumé
(shorter PDF version here).
-
Old weblog:
McEs, A Hacker Life, where I used to write about my
Free Software work.
I wonder if you find what you are looking for here, so feel free to contact me.
Contact information is at the end of this page.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
— some dude
Whitepapers and presentations:
-
2023
Better-Engineered Font Formats: an update.
Slides.
-
2022
Better-Engineered Font Formats.
Video.
-
2020
HarfBuzz OT+AAT "Unishaper".
Slides.
-
2018
Digital Typography.
With Nicolas Rougier. Mini-course at SIGGRAPH.
Slides.
-
2018
Faster Horse.
C++ Font Subsetter: Fast, Flexible, and Secure
.
Rewriting Python-based FontTools font subsetter in C++ in HarfBuzz.
Slides.
Video.
-
2018
FontTools update.
New variation model among other updates.
Slides.
Video.
-
2018
99 Proof Smal Batch Distillery
Rewriting FontTools's GSUB/GPOS table packing.
Slides.
Video.
-
2017
Update on Font Variations in FontTools & Chrome.
I showed how I used calculus, symbolic computation, and code generation, to speed up a design tool by 10x in Python.
Slides.
Video.
-
2016
OpenType GX, an exploratory proposal
Work that led to OpenType 1.8 Font Variations.
Slides.
Video.
-
2015
Universal Shaping
I showed that OpenType Layout format is Turing complete.
Slides.
Video.
-
2015
Fonts without Borders
A review of Free Software font technology progress of the previous years.
Slides.
Video.
-
2014
Reflections on Building the HarfBuzz Indic Shaper.
-
2014
Unicode, OpenType, and Fonts: Closing the Circle
With Roozbeh Pournader.
Slides.
Video.
-
2014
GLyphy: high-quality glyph rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders.
Video.
-
2012
High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting, What happens when an unstoppable bullet
hits an impenetrable wall?.
-
2010
State of Text Rendering.
Overdue for an update, still a good read to understand the pieces of the Free Software
text rendering stack.
Persian stuff:
Projects I develop / maintain:
- HarfBuzz:
the Free Unicode+OpenType text shaping library.
This is what I spend most of my hacking time on these days.
I take credit for naming this one.
- FontTools:
a library to manipulate font files from Python.
- GLyphy:
high-quality text rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders.
- git.mk:
Makefile to automatically generate .gitignore files for autotools-based projects.
Projects I have developed / maintained in the past:
Downloads:
Friends and Family on the Web:
Contact:
Email me to behdad at behdad dot org.