vharfbuzz - A user-friendlier way to use Harfbuzz in Python

uharfbuzz is an awesome tool for shaping text in Python. But it wraps the Harfbuzz C interface quite closely, so still requires you to perform a bunch of boilerplate operations before you can get on with the shaping. This module allows you a slightly more high-level interface to the text shaping process. For example, rather than:

with open(sys.argv[1], 'rb') as fontfile:
    fontdata = fontfile.read()

text = sys.argv[2]

face = hb.Face(fontdata)
font = hb.Font(face)

buf = hb.Buffer()
buf.add_str(text)
buf.guess_segment_properties()

features = {"kern": True, "liga": True}
hb.shape(font, buf, features)

with vharfbuzz you can just say:

vhb = Vharfbuzz(sys.argv[1])
buf = vhb.shape(sys.argv[2], {"features": {"kern": True, "liga": True}})

The Vharfbuzz class also contains a number of other helpful methods to perform common operations on Harfbuzz buffers. See Read The Docs for more information.

Installation

vharfbuzz is available from pypi, so can be installed like so:

pip3 install vharfbuzz

If building from source, you can install it like so:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
pip3 install .