YesLogic

Allsorts Font Shaping Engine 0.16 Release

support@princexml.com (YesLogic) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 10:06:00 +1000

Allsorts now supports shaping Myanmar script, Apple Advanced Typography morx</code> & kern</code> tables, and COLRv0 & COLRv1 colour fonts.</p> </blockquote>
Allsorts</a> is a Rust crate (library) that can parse OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2 fonts, shape text, and subset fonts1</a></sup>. We use it in Prince</a> for all font parsing, shaping, and subsetting.</p>
Allsorts 0.16 is another big release containing new features and improvements built over the last 18 months.</p> </span>
Shaping Myanmar</h2> Allsorts can now shape text that uses Myanmar script, such as Burmese.</p> An extreme example of complex shaping of Myanmar script from the OpenType specification. </figcaption> </figure> Kerning with kern</code></h2> The kern</code> table, inherited from TrueType is an alternative to GPOS</code> for kerning adjustments. It's most commonly encountered in older fonts, or fonts designed specifically for macOS, but some modern fonts like previous versions of OpenSans also use it. Allsorts 0.16 will now make use of a kern</code> table if there is no kerning feature in the GPOS</code> table. In addition to the kern</code> format specified by OpenType, Allsorts also supports Apple's extensions</a> for more sophisticated kern</code>-based kerning.</p> Shaping with morx</code></h2> The extended glyph metamorphosis table (morx</code>)</a> allows specifying a set of transformations that can apply to the glyphs of a font. This is how shaping is achieved in Apple Advanced Typography. It uses a state machine to implement the transformations. Where shaping with GSUB</code> typically requires the shaping engine to have some knowledge of the scripts it can shape, morx</code> allows a single implementation to implement almost any script. The drawback is that all the logic must be encoded in every font instead of once in the shaping engine.</p> Allsorts now implements shaping with morx</code> when the GSUB</code> table is absent. Being an Apple technology, morx</code> is most commonly encountered in fonts shipped on Apple platforms. For example Hoefler Text, and Zapfino.</p> Text set in the Zapfino font from macOS. </figcaption> </figure> COLR Fonts</h2> One of the many mechanisms to achieve colour fonts is through the COLR</code> table, and its companion CPAL</code>. This format is commonly encountered in recent versions of Noto Color Emoji, and Segoe UI Emoji (the Windows emoji font). It uses regular glyph outlines (as opposed to bitmaps or SVG) and colours them by applying paint operators such as fills, clips, and gradients. There are two COLR</code> formats: COLRv0</code>, which allows basic colouring and layering of outlines, and the more sophisticated COLRv1</code> that adds many more operators as well as support for multiple types of gradients.</p> Allsorts supports both formats and provides a generic mechanism for traversing the paint tree. The emitted calls translate well into 2D graphics library APIs that have a PostScript-inspired model, such as Cairo, or Quartz.</p> The Nabla COLRv1 font with highlight and depth variation axes. </figcaption> </figure> Other Improvements & Fixes</h2> There were a number of other smaller fixes and improvements in this release, including:</p> Respecting the flip flag in sbix</code> lookup. This enables the right facing emoji in Apple Color Emoji to work properly.</li> </ul> </li> Applying a maximum limit to GPOS substitutions. This mitigates fonts using a 'billion laughs' attack to exhaust resources.</li> </ul> </li> Applying GPOS</code> lookups in global order. This improves compatibility with Segoe UI Emoji.</li> </ul> </li> Implementing support for mark filtering sets. This was required for some Myanmar script fonts.</li> </ul> </li> Updating Unicode data to Unicode 16.</li> Providing access to bounding box of glyphs. Glyphs can be traversed to calculate their bounding box.</li> </ul> </li> Applying variations when visiting the outlines of glyf</code> based fonts.</li> </ul> With all of these improvements Allsorts went from passing 432 of the Unicode text-rendering-tests</a> to 540, leaving 212 failing tests (mostly scripts that are not yet supported).</p> Project Showcase</h2> Before wrapping up I thought it would be nice to mention some of the other projects that are using Allsorts:</p> Azul</a> desktop GUI framework.</li> printpdf</a> Rust library for creating, reading, writing and rendering PDF documents.</li> flo_draw</a> 2D rendering libraries for Rust.</li> next.js</a> React JS full-stack web framework.</li> </ul> ^{1</sup> Font shaping is the process of taking text in the form of Unicode codepoints and a font, and laying out glyphs according to the text. This involves applying kerning, ligatures, and substitutions specified by the font and performing glyph reordering according to the OpenType rules specific to each complex script.</p> </div>}



Allsorts Font Shaping Engine 0.15 Release
support@princexml.com (YesLogic) — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:54:02 +1000

Allsorts now supports variable fonts, CFF2, and can generate font specimen
documents.</p>
</blockquote>
Allsorts</a> is a Rust crate (library) that can parse OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2
fonts, shape text, and subset fonts1</a></sup>. We use it in Prince</a> for all font
parsing, shaping, and subsetting.</p>
A lot has happened since we last wrote about Allsorts all the way back in
2021. There have been 14 releases since then. In that time Allsorts
gained support for variable fonts, CFF2 outlines, and creating font specimen
documents, as well as a few bug fixes and improvements.</p>
</span>
Variable fonts</h2>
With a history dating back to QuickDraw GX</a> on classic Mac OS, variable
fonts have become popular since their addition to OpenType 1.8 in 2016. A
variable font contains one of more axes of variation: these may be dimensions
like weight or slant but can also be entirely custom. They provide many
benefits, including:</p>

Continuous variation: instead of fixed instances like Light, Medium, Regular, Bold
a variable font allows an axis to support all values between a minimum and maximum.</li>
More compact font files, only one file is needed instead of one for each style.</li>
</ul>

  
  
    Text in various weights of Cantarell.
  </figcaption>
</figure>
Allsorts has gained support for reading variation information as well as
applying it to font data to create a specific font instance. The star of the
variable-fonts show is the new instance function</a>, which given a
variable font and a collection of values for each axis produces a non-variable
font instance that can be embedded in a PDF or used as a regular font in other
code or applications.</p>
CFF2</h2>
As the name implies, CFF2 is a second take on the support for CFF outlines in
OpenType. It eliminates many of the redundancies found in CFF in OpenType, in
addition to adding support for variable fonts. CFF2 fonts are presently most
likely to be encountered in fonts from Adobe but they are also used in other
places, for example the Cantarell</a> font used by the GNOME desktop environment.</p>
CFF Subsetting</h2>
In earlier versions of Allsorts only a limited amount of subsetting was applied
to CFF fonts. Now the CharStrings (glyph outlines) in CFF fonts are also subset
to eliminate unused operators, resulting in much smaller output. This feature
was based upon the CharString parser from ttf-parser</a>, so thanks to RazrFalcon
for that.</p>
Font Specimens</h2>
Sometimes you want to see what a font looks like and know some of the technical
details about it. To support this we added the ability to generate a HTML font
specimen containing sample text and information about the font. This document
generated for Cantarell</a> is an example.</p>
This feature is turned off by default. Enable the specimen</code> Cargo feature
enable it.</p>
Allsorts Tools</h2>
Allsorts tools</a> as been enhanced to make use of the new Allsorts features.
There are three new sub-commands:</p>

variations</code> — list variation information about a font.</li>
instance</code> — create an instance of a variable font.</li>
specimen</code> — generate a font specimen for a font.</li>
</ul>
variations</h3>
variations</code> lists variation axes in a font, their domain and any pre-defined
instances in the font. Example output:</p>
$ allsorts variations /usr/share/fonts/cantarell/Cantarell-VF.otf
</span>Axes: (1)
</span>
</span>- wght = min: 100, max: 800, default: 400
</span>
</span>Instances:
</span>
</span>      Subfamily: Thin
</span>    Coordinates: [100.0]
</span>
</span>      Subfamily: Light
</span>    Coordinates: [300.0]
</span>
</span>      Subfamily: Regular
</span>    Coordinates: [400.0]
</span>
</span>      Subfamily: Bold
</span>    Coordinates: [700.0]
</span>
</span>      Subfamily: Extra Bold
</span>    Coordinates: [800.0]
</span>
</span>Style Attributes:
</span>Thin
</span>Light
</span>Regular
</span>Bold
</span>Extra Bold
</span></code></pre>
instance</h3>
instance</code> is used to produce a non-variable font instance from a variable font.
For example if we wanted an instance of Cantarell with a weight of 555 we'd run:</p>
allsorts instance -t 555 -o Cantarell555.otf /usr/share/fonts/cantarell/Cantarell-VF.otf
</span></code></pre>
specimen</h3>
The specimen</code> command generates a document in HTML format describing features of the
font along with some sample text set in the font. For example,</p>
specimen /usr/share/fonts/cantarell/Cantarell-VF.otf > cantarell.html
</span></code></pre>
View a font specimen for Cantarell</a>.</p>
^{1</sup>
Font shaping is the process of taking text in the form of Unicode codepoints
and a font, and laying out glyphs according to the text. This involves applying
kerning, ligatures, and substitutions specified by the font and performing
glyph reordering according to the OpenType rules specific to each complex
script.</p>
</div>}


Allsorts Font Shaping Engine 0.6 Release
support@princexml.com (YesLogic) — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 13:59:22 +1000

In the last six months we've added support for shaping new scripts, glyph
positioning, accessing glyph contours, improved performance, and more.</p>
</blockquote>
Allsorts</a> is a Rust crate (library) that can parse OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2
fonts, shape text, and subset fonts1</a></sup>. We use it in Prince</a> for all font
parsing, shaping, and subsetting.</p>
Since the Allsorts 0.5 release in Dec 2020 we've continued to improve Allsorts
and expand its capabilities. The 0.6 release adds support for shaping Khmer,
Lao, Thai, and Sinhala scripts; laying out glyphs and obtaining their
positions; accessing glyph contours; improved performance; and a few bug fixes
as well.</p>
</span>
New Scripts</h2>
We continue to expand the scripts Allsorts can shape and have added support for
Khmer, Lao, Thai, and Sinhala scripts. Each new script is accompanied by
extensive corpus-based tests with text extracted from real-world sources like
Wikipedia.</p>

  
  
    Extract from the
    Khmer translation of The Tower of Babel</a>
    shaped in Prince
  </figcaption>
</figure>

  
  
    Extract from the
    Lao translation of The Tower of Babel</a>
    shaped in Prince
  </figcaption>
</figure>

  
  
    Extract from the
    Thai translation of The Tower of Babel</a>
    shaped in Prince
  </figcaption>
</figure>

  
  
    Extract from the
    Sinhala translation of The Tower of Babel</a>
    shaped in Prince
  </figcaption>
</figure>
Glyph Positioning and Contours</h2>
You can now layout glyphs and obtain their positions as well as access glyph
contours. This makes it possible to draw text by pairing Allsorts with any
vector graphics library that supports move to, line to,
quadratic curve to, cubic curve to, and close path
operations.</p>
GlyphLayout</a> is used to obtain the positions for a collection of shaped
glyphs. The position for each glyph includes its horizontal and vertical
advance as well as any (x, y)</code> offset from the origin. Horizontal layout in
left-to-right and right-to-left directions is supported. Basic (but incomplete)
support for vertical text is present too.</p>
The position of a series of glyphs is determined from an initial pen position
(that the application using Allsorts maintains) that is incremented by the
advance of each glyph as they are processed. The position of a particular glyph
is the current pen position plus X and Y offset.</p>
The outline module</a> provides access to the contours of glyphs as a series of
foundational drawing instruction callbacks</a>. Currently we support
reading glyph contours from glyf</code> and CFF</code> tables. The allsorts
tool</a> has been extended to make use of this in order to
generate an SVGs of glyphs.</p>

  
  
    SVG generated with the
    allsorts CLI tool</a>
    presenting glyphs from
    TeX Gyre Termes</a>.
  </figcaption>
</figure>
In turn, we used this SVG generation ability to hook Allsorts up to the
Unicode text rendering tests</a>. Allsorts passes the
tests for features that we support. We hope to integrate Allsorts into the
upstream text rendering tests project soon.</p>

  
  
    Sample test from the
    Unicode text rendering tests</a>
    showing Allsort produces the expected output.
  </figcaption>
</figure>
Performance Improvements</h2>
Various improvements have been made to make some code paths more efficient
leading to mild speed ups in our tests:</p>

Optimised GPOS duplicate lookup removal.</li>
Optimised handling of CFF fonts with custom characters sets.</li>
Fixing a mistake that resulted in vmtx</code> table being repeatedly cloned.</li>
Avoid some allocations when working with glyphs.</li>
</ul>
Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes</h2>

API improvements:

Combine gpos::Info</code> and gpos::Attachment</code> into gpos::Placement</a>.</li>
Allow extra OpenType features</a> to be supplied to Font::shape</code>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Replaced rental</a> with ouroboros</a> as rental was no longer maintained. (Thanks @est31</a>)</li>
Handle post</code> tables that map more than one glyph to the same name index.</li>
Apply Unicode mark reordering to more scripts, not just Arabic and Indic
scripts.</li>
Always apply default shaping for complex scripts.</li>
Handle non-adjacent cursive connections in GPOS</code>.</li>
Support version 1.1 GPOS</code>/GSUB</code> tables.</li>
</ul>
Links</h2>

</a></li>
</a></li>
Allsorts CLI tool</a></li>
</ul>
^{1</sup>
Font shaping is the process of taking text in the form of Unicode codepoints
and a font, and laying out glyphs according to the text. This involves
honouring kerning, ligatures, and substitutions specified by the font and
performing glyph reordering according to the script-specific OpenType rules.</p>
</div>
Font subsetting refers to decreasing the size of a font by only including the data
for a reduced set of glyphs.</p>}


Allsorts Font Shaping Engine Year in Review
support@princexml.com (YesLogic) — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:06:35 +1100

A year ago YesLogic open-sourced the Allsorts font parser, shaping engine,
and subsetter. In this post we cover how Allsorts has worked out in Prince</a>,
what's improved over the past year, and what we're working on next.</p>
</blockquote>
Allsorts</a> is a Rust crate (library) that can parse OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2
fonts, shape text, and subset fonts1</a></sup>.</p>
</span>
At YesLogic we've been using Allsorts to power all font parsing, shaping of
supported scripts, and subsetting in Prince since version 13 was released in November
2019. Aside from the odd small bug revealed by real-world usage and exposure to
new fonts it has proven to be capable and reliable.</p>
Over the past year we've continued to work on Allsorts, adding support for
additional scripts, bitmap and SVG fonts, and refined the
API to make it easier to use.</p>
New Scripts</h2>
Allsorts can now shape the Arabic and Syriac scripts giving us even more coverage of the
world's scripts.</p>

  
  
    Extract from the
    Arabic translation of The Tower of Babel</a>
    shaped in Prince
  </figcaption>
</figure>

  
  
    Extract from the
    Syriac translation of The Tower of Babel</a>
    shaped in Prince
  </figcaption>
</figure>
Bitmap and SVG Fonts</h2>
We can now parse OpenType font tables containing bitmaps and SVGs:</p>

CBDT</code>/CBLC</code></a> and EBDT</code>/EBLC</code>, as used by Noto Color Emoji</a>.</li>
sbix</code></a>, as used by Apple Color Emoji</a>.</li>
SVG</code></a>, as used by Twitter Color Emoji</a>.</li>
</ul>
We implemented a unified API that supports retrieving the image for a glyph
independent of the tables it originates from.</p>
The bitmap and SVG support has allowed us to bring emoji and colour SVG font
support to Prince 14:</p>

  
  Text set in the Fattern colour SVG font</a></figcaption>
</figure>
Improved API</h2>
Prior to Allsorts 0.5 it was a fairly involved affair to shape some text. You
had to read the font, do glyph mapping, apply glyph substitution (GSUB), and
apply glyph positioning (GPOS) in individual steps which amounted to quite a
bit of code.</p>
Now it's only a few lines. You read the font and construct an instance of the
Font</code> type, turn text into glyphs with a call to map_glyphs</code>, then shape the
text with a call to shape</code>:</p>
// Read and parse font
</span>let</span> buffer = std::fs::read(&opts.font)?;
</span>let</span> scope = ReadScope::new(&buffer);
</span>let</span> font_file = scope.read::<FontData<'_>>()?;
</span>
</span>// Construct Font instance
</span>let</span> provider = font_file.</span>table_provider</span>(opts.index)?;
</span>let mut</span> font = </span>match </span>Font::new(provider)?
</span>    .</span>expect</span>("</span>unable to find suitable cmap subtable</span>");
</span>};
</span>
</span>// Map glyphs
</span>let</span> glyphs = font.</span>map_glyphs</span>("</span>some text</span>", MatchingPresentation::NotRequired);
</span>
</span>// Shape glyphs
</span>let</span> script = tag::</span>LATN</span>;
</span>let</span> lang = tag::from_string("</span>ENG </span>")?;
</span>let</span> shaped_glyphs = font.</span>shape</span>(
</span>    glyphs,
</span>    script,
</span>    Some(lang),
</span>    &Features::Mask(GsubFeatureMask::default()),
</span>    </span>true</span>,
</span>)?;
</span></code></pre>
We also renamed a number of types and methods to make their function more
obvious and accurate.</p>
Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes</h2>
Throughout the year we made several other improvements and fixes, including:</p>


Extended our glyph substitution support, implementing GSUB Lookup Type
8</a> (Reverse Chaining Contextual Single Substitution), which gains us
support for Tristan Hume's Numderline font</a>:</p>

  
  Text set in the Numderline font</a></figcaption>
</figure>
</li>

Fixed a few bugs and handled some quirks revealed by exposing the code to
a variety of real world fonts.</p>
</li>

Improved performance through:</p>

GSUB caching in Arabic, Syriac, and Indic.</li>
Restructuring to avoid unnecessary bounds checks and allocations.</li>
Using tinyvec</a> to store codepoints on glyphs.</li>
</ul>
</li>

Added support for more OpenType features in GSUB:</p>

Standard ligatures (liga</code>).</li>
Discretionary ligatures (dlig</code>).</li>
Historical ligatures (hlig</code>).</li>
Contextual ligatures (clig</code>).</li>
Small caps (smcp</code>).</li>
Small capitals from capitals (c2sc</code>).</li>
Lining figures (lnum</code>).</li>
Oldstyle figures (onum</code>).</li>
Proportional figures (pnum</code>).</li>
Tabular figures (tnum</code>).</li>
Diagonal fractions (frac</code>).</li>
Stacked fractions (afrc</code>).</li>
Ordinals (ordn</code>).</li>
Slashed zero (zero</code>).</li>
Language-specific OpenType shaping (locl</code>).</li>
</ul>
</li>

Support fonts with Big5 encoded cmap subtables.</p>
</li>
</ul>
Future Plans</h2>
We're currently implementing the following features to make Allsorts
better suited for use cases outside our own:</p>

Expose glyph positioning information in shaping output so you don't have to
calculate it yourself.</li>
Retrieve glyph contours as a series of basic drawing operations.</li>
</ul>
After those we hope to look into:</p>

Text segmentation by script to allow a chunk of text to be supplied to
Allsorts without having to detect and segment it by script first.</li>
Glyph caching.</li>
</ul>
Other items on our radar are:</p>

Performance measurement and optimisation to make it competitive with other
shaping libraries.</li>
Support additional scripts such as Sinhala, and Indic 3/Universal Shaping
Engine</a>.</li>
Unicode normalisation.</li>
Being able to map shaping output back to the source text.</li>
</ul>
Links</h2>

Allsorts on GitHub</a></li>
Allsorts Example Tools</a></li>
YesLogic on Twitter</a></li>
PrinceXML on Twitter</a></li>
</ul>
Acknowledgements</h2>
Thanks to Adrian, Alfie, Michael, Paul, and Peter for helping me write this
post.</p>
^{1</sup>
Font shaping is the process of taking text in the form of Unicode codepoints
and a font, and laying out glyphs according to the text. This involves
honouring kerning, ligatures, substitutions, and reordering specified by the
font.</p>
</div>
Font subsetting refers to decreasing the size of a font by only including the data
for a reduced set of glyphs.</p>}


Announcing the Allsorts Font Shaping Engine
support@princexml.com (YesLogic) — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:00:00 +1100

Today YesLogic is open-sourcing the Allsorts</a> font parser, shaping engine, and subsetter for OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2 under the Apache 2.0 license. Allsorts was extracted from the Prince</a> HTML to PDF typesetting and layout tool and is implemented in Rust.</p>
</blockquote>
Prince</a> is a tool that converts HTML and CSS into well laid out PDFs. Our customers use it to produce books, restaurant menus, invoices, business cards, and much more. Two years ago YesLogic set out to improve the font parsing and shaping in Prince.</p>
</span>
Font shaping is the process of laying out the glyphs of a font in order to represent some input text. Rasterisation of the glyphs is a separate process. Font shaping for Latin text is quite simple. For some scripts, like those used by Indic languages</a>, it is quite complex and requires reordering and substituting the glyphs in each syllable to produce the final output. There are only three main font shaping engines in use today: DirectWrite</a> on Windows, CoreText</a> on macOS and iOS, and HarfBuzz</a> on open-source operating systems and some web-browsers. Of these, only HarfBuzz is open source.</p>
Unfortunately there is no complete specification of how to perform font shaping for complex scripts, so determining the desired behaviour often comes down to observing what the other font shaping engines do and implementing that. In the hope of improving this situation we have been supporting Nathan Willis in an effort to document the OpenType shaping behaviour</a>.</p>
Prince is mostly written in the Mercury logic programming language</a> but when it came to building the new font parsing and shaping engine we chose Rust. The reasons include a growing community and ecosystem, good interoperability with C (Mercury compiles to C), strong memory safety guarantees, high performance, minimal runtime, and cross-platform support (we build Prince binaries for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows).</p>
Rust’s memory safety was especially important as it helps avoid programming errors when parsing binary data (such as fonts) and performing shaping. These types of errors have been a source of security issues in other implementations1</a>, 2</a>, 3</a>, 4</a></sup>.</p>

  The two images below compare a paragraph of text from the Wikipedia page on the Chandas font in Firefox and a PDF generated in Prince (viewed in Evince</a>).</p>
  

    
    Chandas Wikipedia page</a> in Firefox 70.0.1</figcaption>
  </figure>
  
    
    Chandas Wikipedia page</a> in Prince 13</figcaption>
  </figure>
</aside>
 Allsorts</a> — a reference to typographic sorts</a>, and a licorice confectionery</a> — is the result of this two year effort. It has been extracted from Prince and open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. The initial release has been published to crates.io</a>. We’ve also published some example tools</a> that use Allsorts to dump font information, shape text, and subset fonts.</p>
The support for Indic scripts in Allsorts was based on Nathan’s new specification. We tested it by comparing Allsorts output to HarfBuzz</a> on a large corpus of real world text in each of the supported Indic languages.</p>
Allsorts supports parsing OpenType (TrueType and CFF variants), WOFF, and WOFF2 fonts. It can also serialise and subset these formats in a manner suitable for inclusion in PDF documents. It supports shaping of many scripts, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indic scripts, and Latin. Indic layout supports Indic2 font layout.</p>
Font parsing in Allsorts uses an approach designed to be amenable to machine generation by our work-in-progress declarative data definition language</a>. The DDL aims to allow formally specifying binary data formats such as fonts. For more information on this work, see Brendan’s talk at the Melbourne Compose Conference</a> earlier this year.</p>
We’re using Allsorts to power all font parsing, shaping of supported scripts, and subsetting in Prince 13. Allsorts is faster than the previous Mercury/C font parsing and shaping implementation used in Prince. We have not yet done a detailed performance comparison to other font shaping engines as we are still focusing on correctness before beginning performance optimisation.</p>
Being a new project Allsorts does have some limitations: the crate is only lightly documented, and it doesn’t support shaping Arabic (Prince still uses its own Mercury implementation for this), Khmer, Tibetan, and Mongolian yet.</p>
We’re excited to publish this release and it’s our hope that Allsorts sees use in many different applications in the future. In the near term we look forward to integrating it more into the ecosystem of font handling in Rust and hope that it becomes a popular choice for pure Rust font handling and shaping.</p>
Links</h3>

Allsorts on GitHub</a></li>
Allsorts Example Tools</a></li>
Nathan’s Font Shaping Documents</a></li>
</ul>

YesLogic

Allsorts Font Shaping Engine 0.16 Release

Other Improvements & Fixes</h2> There were a number of other smaller fixes and improvements in this release, including:</p>

Allsorts Font Shaping Engine 0.15 Release

variations</h3> variations</code> lists variation axes in a font, their domain and any pre-defined instances in the font. Example output:</p>

instance</h3> instance</code> is used to produce a non-variable font instance from a variable font. For example if we wanted an instance of Cantarell with a weight of 555 we'd run:</p>

specimen</h3> The specimen</code> command generates a document in HTML format describing features of the font along with some sample text set in the font. For example,</p>

Allsorts Font Shaping Engine 0.6 Release

Performance Improvements</h2> Various improvements have been made to make some code paths more efficient leading to mild speed ups in our tests:</p>

Allsorts Font Shaping Engine Year in Review

Bitmap and SVG Fonts</h2> We can now parse OpenType font tables containing bitmaps and SVGs:</p>

Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes</h2> Throughout the year we made several other improvements and fixes, including:</p>

Future Plans</h2> We're currently implementing the following features to make Allsorts better suited for use cases outside our own:</p>

Announcing the Allsorts Font Shaping Engine