Behdad Esfahbod Papers & Talks

• 2026 — HarfBuzz at 20! looking back with 20/20 vision — Slides | Video
• 2026Q1 — Fonts Quarterly: embracing agentic coding — Paper
• 2026 — HarfBuzz at 20! all you ever wanted to know about HarfBuzz and then some — Slides
• 2025Q4 — Fonts Quarterly: HarfBust solution, HarfBuzz changes, etc. — Paper
• 2025Q3 — Fonts Quarterly: HarfRust and others — Paper
• 2025 — HarfBust: a font software puzzle for the curious — Puzzle
• 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: AAT layout caches — Paper
• 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: OpenType Layout lookup caches — Paper
• 2025Q2 — Fonts Quarterly: Optimizing mega variable-fonts and introducing HarfRust — Paper
• 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: Introducing HarfRust — Paper
• 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: Subsetter (with Garret Rieger) — Paper
• 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: Caching — Paper
• 2025Q1 — Fonts Quarterly: Optimize all the things / Everybody gets font-funcs — Paper
• 2025 — Memory usage of loading glyph outlines — Paper
• 2025 — Fontations benchmark on different font technology — Paper
• 2025 — HarfBuzz Study: hb-decycler — Paper
• 2024Q4 — Fonts Hangout: Or How I spent my time so far this quarter… — Paper
• 2024 — Better-Engineered Font Formats: yet another update — Slides | Video | LWN
• 2024 — State of Text Rendering 2024 — 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 — HarfBuzz Study: hb-iter — Paper
• 2022 — HarfBuzz Study: A C library written in C++ — Paper
• 2022 — HarfBuzz Study: The case of the slow hb-ft h_advance function — Paper
• 2022 — HarfBuzz Study: PackTab: A static integer table packer — Paper
• 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 — Paper | Slides | Video
• 2018 — FontTools update — Slides | Video
• 2018 — 99 Proof Small Batch Distillery — Slides | Video
• 2017 — Variations on Variations — Slides | Video | TypoTalks
• 2016 — The Open Source Python Font Production Pipeline (with Marek Jeziorek) — Slides | Video
• 2016 — Special OpenType Session — Video
• 2016 — Ten Years of HarfBuzz — Slides | Video
• 2016 — OpenType GX, an exploratory proposal — Paper | Slides | Video
• 2016 — FontTools/TTX: The Power of Open Source for OpenType (with Just van Rossum) — Slides | Video
• 2015 — Universal Shaping — Slides | Video
• 2015 — Fonts without Borders — Slides | Video
• 2015 — OpenType BE: Behdad's "OpenType 2.0" wishlist/agenda! — Paper | Slide | LWN
• 2014 — HarfBuzz Study: Building the 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 — Slides | LWN
• 2014 — GLyphy: high-quality glyph rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders — Slides | Video
• 2012 — HarfBuzz Study: Memory Consumption — Paper
• 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) — Paper | Slides | LWN
• 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. thesis
• 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. thesis
• 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