Behdad Esfahbod Papers & Talks

∞ 2026

HarfBuzz: The quest for universal text shaping — Paper
HarfBuzz at 20! looking back with 20/20 vision — Slides | Video
Fonts Quarterly — Q1: Embracing agentic coding — Paper
HarfBuzz at 20! all you ever wanted to know about HarfBuzz and then some — Slides

Fonts Quarterly — Q4: HarfBust solution, HarfBuzz changes, etc. — Paper
Fonts Quarterly — Q3: HarfRust and others — Paper
HarfBust: a font software puzzle for the curious — Puzzle
HarfBuzz Study: AAT layout caches — Paper
HarfBuzz Study: OpenType Layout lookup caches — Paper
Fonts Quarterly — Q2: Optimizing mega variable-fonts and introducing HarfRust — Paper
HarfBuzz Study: Introducing HarfRust — Paper
HarfBuzz Study: Subsetter (with Garret Rieger) — Paper
HarfBuzz Study: Caching — Paper
Fonts Quarterly — Q1: Optimize all the things / Everybody gets font-funcs — Paper
Memory usage of loading glyph outlines — Paper
Fontations benchmark on different font technology — Paper
HarfBuzz Study: hb-decycler — Paper

Boring Expansion extensions to OpenType — Slides
Better-Engineered Font Formats: an update (with Dave Crossland) — Slides | Video

Digital Typography (with Nicolas Rougier) — Mini-course at SIGGRAPH | Slides
Faster Horse. C++ Font Subsetter: Fast, Flexible, and Secure — Paper | Slides | Video
FontTools update — Slides | Video
99 Proof Small Batch Distillery — Slides | Video

The Open Source Python Font Production Pipeline (with Marek Jeziorek) — Slides | Video
Special OpenType Session — Video
Ten Years of HarfBuzz — Slides | Video
OpenType GX, an exploratory proposal — Paper | Slides | Video
FontTools/TTX: The Power of Open Source for OpenType (with Just van Rossum) — Slides | Video

HarfBuzz Study: Building the Indic Shaper — Paper
Unicode, OpenType, and Fonts: Closing the Circle (with Roozbeh Pournader) — Slides | Video
FontTools: reviving an Open Source project, rebuilding a thriving community — Slides | LWN
GLyphy: high-quality glyph rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders — Slides | Video

HarfBuzz Study: Memory Consumption — Paper
High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting, What happens when an unstoppable bullet hits an impenetrable wall? — Paper

State of Text Rendering — (superseded by the 2024 update) — Paper | Slides | LWN
HarfBuzz: the Free and Open Shaping Engine — Slides
Free Software stack for Unicode Text Rendering — Slides
GNOME and Living a Happy Life — Slides

Co-maintaining Cairo: cool community, cool code (with Carl Worth) — Slides | Video

FarsiTeX and the Iranian TeX Community (with Roozbeh Pournader) — Paper | Slides