glyphware

A neutral OTF/TTF font engine on top of FreeType + HarfBuzz. It provides, from one shared FreeType library:

• rich metadata per face — name table (family / subfamily / full / PostScript / typographic), OS/2 weight-width-slant, color/monospace flags, variable-font axes, and compact cmap coverage ranges;
• glyph geometry in both shapes a consumer might need — vector outlines (for vector text / ThorVG) and rendered bitmaps (AA / mono / BGRA color);
• HarfBuzz text shaping (glyph ids + positioned advances/offsets + clusters);
• a rich query surface (name + style + language/script + covered codepoints).

glyphware is host-agnostic: it never touches the filesystem or any archive. The host supplies font bytes through a FontLoader, so a host with its own shared on-memory cache can hand back blobs that alias its cached buffers (no copy). It knows nothing about 吉里吉里 — it is intended to be consumed equally by the 吉里吉里Z engine core, its Elements/ThorVG UI, and the layerExVector plugin.

Design

See the umbrella design plan (kirikiri font-unification) — glyphware is the "unified font engine library" that replaces the three-plus independent FreeType/HarfBuzz stacks scattered across the core and plugins.

Third-party libraries and licenses

glyphware links the following third-party libraries. When distributing a binary that includes glyphware, retain these libraries' license notices.

Library	Used for	License
FreeType	face loading, glyph outlines & bitmaps, metadata (SFNT/OS-2/fvar/cmap)	The FreeType License (FTL, BSD-style with a credit clause) or GPLv2 — dual-licensed
HarfBuzz	text shaping	MIT ("Old MIT" license)
SheenBidi	Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (BiDi)	Apache-2.0
picojson	fonts.json manifest parsing (header-only)	BSD-2-Clause

Pulled in transitively by FreeType (via vcpkg): zlib (zlib license), libpng (PNG Reference Library license), bzip2 (bzip2 license).

FreeType and HarfBuzz are provided by the vcpkg manifest (vcpkg.json); SheenBidi is fetched by CMake FetchContent from the wtnbgo fork (custom branch = v3.0.0 + an SB_INSTALL option so embedding projects can suppress its install rules; see GLYPHWARE_INSTALL below). The BiDi backend is isolated behind src/Bidi_sheenbidi.cpp, so SheenBidi can be swapped (e.g. for ICU) without affecting the rest.

glyphware's own license is to be set by the project owner (Wamsoft); this section records only the third-party dependencies' terms.

Build

Requires a C++17 compiler, CMake ≥ 3.20, and vcpkg (VCPKG_ROOT set). FreeType and HarfBuzz are pulled by the vcpkg manifest (vcpkg.json); SheenBidi is fetched via FetchContent.

cmake --preset x64-windows
cmake --build build/x64-windows --config Release
ctest --test-dir build/x64-windows -C Release --output-on-failure

CMake options: GLYPHWARE_BUILD_TESTS (default ON) builds the tests; GLYPHWARE_INSTALL (default ON) generates install rules for glyphware and the bundled SheenBidi — parent projects embedding glyphware via add_subdirectory can set it to OFF to keep both out of their install tree.

The glyphware_smoke test opens a real font (a system font by default, or one passed as its first argument) and exercises metadata / outline / bitmap / shaping end-to-end.

Layout

• include/glyphware/ — public headers (Blob, Descriptor, Library, Face, Shaper, Bidi, Layout, Registry, Manifest, umbrella glyphware.h).
• src/ — implementation.
• tests/ — smoke test.

Text layout comes in two levels, both in glyphware/Layout.h:

• layoutLine — one line: BiDi → face itemization → shaping → positioned glyphs in visual order.
• layoutBlock — flow into a rectangle: explicit newlines, greedy word / per-character (CJK) wrapping with Japanese 行頭/行末禁則, alignment, a height bound, and a cluster count limit for typewriter reveals. Wrapping is always resolved for the full text before count is applied, so a reveal never reflows.

Status

Milestone A (standalone library): scaffold + shared FreeType library + host-injected loader seam + face open + metadata extraction + glyph outline/bitmap + HarfBuzz shaping. Registry + rich-query index are next.