Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements.

HatfBuzz 14.2 is out today with more improvements to its GPU library as well as vector and raster libraries. The GPU library has a new color-glyph paint renderer, the hb-gpu utility added various new options for demonstrating the HarfBuzz GPU support, and more.

The HarfBuzz vector library meanwhile gained a new PDF output back-end and other improvements.

HarfBuzz developers are anticipating these experimental libraries will be graduated soon as their code and API are stabilizing. At that point API and ABI stability is expected.

Those wanting to learn more about HarfBuzz 14.2 can do so via GitHub .