Including HarfBuzz - the very best OpenSource MIT licensed text shaping engine in the market today

[Vivi_Ram]

I'd like to suggest PhotoLine adopt HarfBuzz as its text-shaping engine. A few reasons this would be a strong investment:

1. Proper complex script support.
HarfBuzz handles the shaping rules that simple character-by-character rendering can't: contextual letterforms (Arabic), reordering and conjunct forms (Devanagari and other Indic scripts), and correct ligature/diacritic placement across scripts in general. Without a real shaping engine, these scripts render with visibly broken or disconnected letterforms — a serious limitation for any DTP-capable tool aiming at a global user base. I tried using it in LibreOffice. It is extremely efficient and good. And can maintain consistency for even very difficult ligatures in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, as well as Devanagari and Tibetan.

2. Industry-standard, battle-tested.
HarfBuzz is the shaping engine behind Chrome, Firefox, LibreOffice, Android, and increasingly Adobe's own products. The latest versions of both Photoshop and Illustrator have integrated HarfBuzz. Adopting it isn't a risky bet — it's adopting the same foundation the rest of the industry has already converged on, which means edge cases are already discovered and fixed by a huge existing user base rather than PhotoLine's own team hitting them fresh.

3. Better OpenType feature support.
HarfBuzz correctly applies advanced OpenType features — ligatures, contextual alternates, small caps, stylistic sets, kerning tables — that a custom or simplified text engine often only partially supports. For a tool used in real design/DTP work, that directly affects how professional and typographically accurate the output looks, especially with high-quality display or editorial fonts that lean heavily on these features.

4. Open source and actively maintained.
It's free to integrate (MIT-licensed), maintained by a broad group of contributors including major browser vendors, and it's a mature, stable dependency rather than something the team would need to build or maintain in-house going forward.

5. Would strengthen PhotoLine's DTP positioning.
Since PhotoLine already competes in the small-scale desktop publishing space (multi-page docs, character/paragraph styles, text flow), correct shaping for multilingual and complex-script text is one of the areas where dedicated tools like InDesign still have a clear edge. Closing that specific gap could meaningfully widen who can rely on PhotoLine for real typesetting work, not just Latin-script layouts.

It is the single best option available for text shaping. And that fact that it is MIT Licensed means you can include it in your product without any qualifications or worries about legalities.

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz - Here's the Github link to the project. It is constantly updated by contributors worldwide.

[Vivi_Ram]

Just want to add: Harfbuzz is maintained together by with contributions from Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Red Hat, among others. It is likely to be the gold standard as far as non-Latin text rendering goes. @Martin and @Gerhard: Would love to hear your thoughts.