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:

• Google's Persian Transliteration tool, converting Fargilisi to Persian.
• Join the Persian Computing discussion group.
• Behdad's Editor, with Open and Save functionality now.
• Behdad's Calendar, supports multiple-system calendar as used in Iran.
• With my friend Pooya, we run the RiRa Persian Digital Library. The database as well as the source code are available here.
• Khaateraat-e Yek Asb, by Yar-Ali PourMoghaddam. I did the online version (by permission).
• The Little Prince the masterpiece by Antoine Saint-Exupery, translated to Persian by Ahmad Shamlou (also vocal). I did the online version (by permission).

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:

• BiCon: the bidirectional terminal emulator.
• Fontconfig: library for font customization and configuration.
• Cairo: graphics library.
• Pango: the GNOME Unicode text rendering library.
• gucharmap: the GNOME Unicode character map.
• vte: the GNOME terminal emulation widget.
• GNU FriBidi: an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (bidi).
• preload: an adaptive readahead daemon.
• The FarsiTeX Project
• The FarsiWeb Project
• The Fedora Project
• The Freedesktop.org Projects (Cairo graphics, Fontconfig,
• The GNOME Project. More about my GNOME involvement here.
• The Unicode Standard

Downloads:

• Download directory, contains old presentations, publications, course projects, etc. (including my BSc FarsiTeX thesis and my MSc preload thesis)

Friends and Family on the Web:

• My friend Pouria started Café Pamenar in the heart of Toronto's hip Kensington Market. Drop by when you're around.
• My brother Behnam. He also maintains esfahbod.info.
• Older sister Bahareh.

Contact:

Email me to behdad at behdad dot org.