HarfBuzz 13.0.0 released with new experimental features: `hb-vector` for vector output of glyph outlines to SVG and `hb-raster` for rasterizing glyphs to A8 / BGRA32 images, among other features.

[ianbicking@hachyderm.io]

@behdad it’s disappointing people are meeting your honesty about useful contributions with all this negative energy, but I hope you can put it aside as the dysfunctions of social media and not take it on as a judgement of the good faith work you are doing

[p@raru.re]

Congratulations, your license is now invalid
@behdad

[jlink@det.social]

@mcc @iorsh @dysfun What can we control? I cannot force anyone to make warning labels, but I can choose the namespace I attach to something I fork.

[tjk@oldbytes.space]

@behdad That's incredibly disappointing to hear.

[alerque@mastodon.social]

@a1ba @behdad You need a shaper for any language, even ones you know. Odds are in my favor that you composed that toot in something that shapes English with Harbuzz.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@jlink @iorsh @dysfun That's a good point, and don't let my comments dissuade you from doing a thing you think would be helpful.

I think the place to start is clear messages in contributor rules or DCOs banning agent contributions. I've got language for this in my own repos, but I don't think there's a standard/best practices text people could cut and paste. Of course, this isn't a quickly findable sign of quality, which is what you're seeking (contributor guidelines are in inconsistent places)

[a1ba@suya.place]

@alerque @behdad maybe, I wouldn't argue here.

But rendering English, Kazakh or Russian text is pretty much possible without HarfBuzz. And that's what, in fact, what I do in my own projects.

Sure, it doesn't do stuff like ligatures and maps UTF-8 text to Unicode code points in a very stupid way. But for my own cases for the languages I know, it's just enough.

[hexaheximal@mstdn.social]

@behdad I'm disappointed.

[khaled@typo.social]

@iorsh You approved FontForge PRs co-authored by Claude Code, are you going to fork FontForge as well?

@mcc @dysfun @behdad

[splendorr@mastodon.social]

@ianbicking @behdad incorrect! all concerns and objections to LLM use are valid, because there are so many problems with them! you have to ignore *so many downstream effects* to take this position :[

[iorsh@kishkush.net]

@khaled
I said I understand @dysfun's sentiment, I didn't say I support it.

[khaled@typo.social]

@iorsh I misread you then. I was sincerely curious. @dysfun

[behdad@typo.social]

@splendorr @ianbicking As I said, community is welcome to fork. Forking is an ethical solution to concerns like this.

That said, I researched downstream projects: Debian, Mozilla, GNOME, Fedora, a bunch others, and the way I use LLM's is compatible with their policies.

Also fortunately, text *shaping* in HarfBuzz is super stable and doesn't change often. A fork of that is very feasible for distros that absolutely can't ship this.

[khaled@typo.social]

@dysfun I don’t know you, but @iorsh is a someone I interacted with before in good terms, and specifically helped him integrate HarfBuzz in FontForge.

[iorsh@kishkush.net]

@dysfun

@khaled and I have known each other for a while, please rest assured we are fine.

[jerojasro@col.social]

@behdad OTOH, I apologize: I ended up as part of the pile up upon you.

I understand it's difficult to maintain a project and find the resources one needs to do so. Thank you for that, and I'm sorry.

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@ianbicking @behdad Unlike

It's actually *positive energy* to care about ethics, my dude.

[lea@lea.pet]

@behdad@typo.social L

[alwayscurious@infosec.exchange]

@behdad @splendorr @ianbicking I noticed that a hallucination made it into a commit and had to be fixed in a later one. Is that something to be concerned about?

[alwayscurious@infosec.exchange]

@jaredwhite @ianbicking @behdad Why call out the Harfbuzz maintainers specifically? Criticising LLMs in general is perfectly okay, but I don’t see a reason to single out the maintainers of a single project. My understanding is that Harfbuzz has only two major developers, yet it is responsible for text rendering in every major open source project except Wine.