Behdad Esfahbod

2024-01-14: "Ruminate with Me: An update on my mental health".
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 Sari, Mazandaran, Iran; and moved to Toronto, Canada in 2003. Since then I lived in Menlo Park, CA and Seattle, WA, before moving to Edmonton, Canada.

Previously, 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 Tehran, 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 Android, Google Chrome, Linux desktop, OpenJDK, Microsoft Edge, Adobe products, and elsewhere.

More about me:

• CouchSurfing, Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Google Maps, IMDB, Instagram, LinkedIn, Luc Devroye, Mastodon, Medium, Vimeo, Wikipedia, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube.
• Current “Art” résumé.
• Old résumé (shorter PDF version here) [last updated 2014].
• 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.

Non-technical writings:

• Pixels and Poems—چیزها و شعرها: A collection of memoirs, poems, and other writings. Persian and English.

Whitepapers and presentations, mostly on fonts and text rendering:

• 2024 Better-Engineered Font Formats: yet another update. LWN Coverage. Slides. Video.
• 2024 State of Text Rendering 2024. A survey of the Free & Open Source fonts & text rendering landscape advancements since 2009. Paper.
• 2024 Some Font Tools. With Marianna Paszkowska. Slides.
• 2024 Updates on Font Format Standardization Efforts. Slides.
• 2023 Boring Expansion extensions to OpenType. Slides.
• 2023 Better-Engineered Font Formats: an update. With Dave Crossland. Slides. Video.
• 2022 Better-Engineered Font Formats. Slides. Video.
• 2020 HarfBuzz OT+AAT "Unishaper". Slides.
• 2019 Fonts. Aren't they, like, done? Slides.
• 2019 Behdad's Story. My departing note at Google. Paper.
• 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. Paper. 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 Variations on Variations. I used calculus, symbolic computation, and code generation, to speed up a tool 10x. Coverage. Slides. Video.
• 2016 The Open Source Python Font Production Pipeline. With Marek Jeziorek. Slides. Video.
• 2016 Special OpenType Session. We announced Variable Fonts. Video.
• 2016 Ten Years of HarfBuzz. Slides. Video.
• 2016 OpenType GX, an exploratory proposal. Work that led to OpenType 1.8 Font Variations. Paper. Slides. Video.
• 2016 FontTools/TTX: The Power of Open Source for OpenType. With Just van Rossum. 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.
• 2015 OpenType BE: Behdad's "OpenType 2.0" wishlist/agenda! LWN Coverage. Paper. Slide.
• 2014 Reflections on Building the HarfBuzz Indic Shaper. Paper.
• 2014 Unicode, OpenType, and Fonts: Closing the Circle. With Roozbeh Pournader. Slides. Video.
• 2014 FontTools: reviving an Open Source project, rebuilding a thriving community. LWN Coverage. Slides.
• 2014 GLyphy: high-quality glyph rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders. Slides. Video.
• 2012 High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting, What happens when an unstoppable bullet hits an impenetrable wall?. Paper.
• 2009 State of Text Rendering. Superseded by the 2024 update. Still a good read to understand the pieces of the Free Software text rendering stack earlier. LWN Coverage. Paper. Slides.
• 2009 HarfBuzz: the Free and Open Shaping Engine. Slides.
• 2009 Free Software stack for Unicode Text Rendering. Slides.
• 2009 GNOME and Living a Happy Life. Slides.
• 2008 GNOME: ten years of freedom. Slides.
• 2007 Co-maintaining Cairo: cool community, cool code. With Carl Worth. Slides. Video.
• 2006 Preload—An Adaptive Prefetching Daemon. MSc. dissertation.
• 2006 Vertical Pango. Slides.
• 2006 All Your Fonts Are... Slides.
• 2005 Bloat of Data in the Unicode Era. In Persian. Slides.
• 2004 Revisiting the FarsiTeX Typesetting System. In Persian. BSc. dissertation.
• 2004 Bidirectional Layouts in GTK+. Slides.
• 2004 Persian Computing with Unicode. Paper. Slides.
• 2003 TeX, LaTeX, and FarsiTeX. With Hamed Hatami. Slides.
• 2002 FarsiTeX and the Iranian TeX Community. With Roozbeh Pournader. Paper. Slides.
• 2001 What is Unicode. Slides.

Persian stuff:

• RiRa Persian Digital Library. With Pooya Karimian. The database as well as the source code are available.
• Khaateraat-e Yek Asb, by Yar-Ali PourMoghaddam. I produced the online version (by permission).
• The Little Prince, the masterpiece by Antoine Saint-Exupery, translated to Persian by Ahmad Shamlou (also audio). I produced the online version (by permission).
• The Little Brother, the novel by Cory Doctorow, translated to Persian by [name withheld]. I produced the PDF version (by permission).
• Behdad's Editor, with Open and Save functionality.
• Behdad's Calendar, supports multiple-system calendar as used in Iran.
• Persian Computing discussion group.

Projects I mainly develop / maintain:

• HarfBuzz: the Free Unicode OpenType/AAT 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.
• HalfKern: a font kerning audit tool.

Projects I have developed / maintained in the past:

• GLyphy: high-quality text rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders.
• git.mk: Makefile to automatically generate .gitignore files for autotools-based projects.
• 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.
• 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.
• More at my GitHub repositories page.

Friends and family on the web:

• My dear friend, co-producer, and reknowned film-maker, Mania Akbari.
• 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.