Both XeTeX and Mozilla Firefox have opensource code which uses HarfBuzz for 
line setting but combines it with other techniques to perform paragraph-level 
line breaking, hyphenation and justification. 

In a way, FreeType takes a font, glyph ids and their positions, and delivers an 
image. HarfBuzz takes a font and plain Unicode text, and delivers glyph ids and 
their positions in a line. 

But "something else" (e.g. code that needs to be written) would be needed for 
paragraphs. 

Paragraph setting is not at all easy, and can be done in a number of ways. If 
your paragraphs are always left-aligned, rectangular, and don't use 
hyphenation, then it’s easy. But if they need to wrap around graphics or use 
freeform margins, use hyphenation, multiple fonts etc. — the code needs to deal 
with situations that are completely out of scope for HarfBuzz. Yes, even 
setting one word in bold or italic would require the paragraph composer code to 
be aware of multiple fonts and some kind of “markup” or “rich text” — something 
that HarfBuzz doesn’t do and isn’t intended for. 

Best,
Adam

Sent from my mobile phone.

> On 13.06.2016, at 17:00, Kelvin Ma <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> So I’ve not received an answer to this anywhere, so, how do I typeset 
> paragraphs with Harfbuzz? How do I use the ‘safe-to-break’ iterator?
> 
> Because it sounds like right now I’d have to shape the *entire* paragraph as 
> one line, then find the last shaped glyph that falls before the cutoff point, 
> then iterate backwards from the character corresponding to the glyph 
> following *that*, on each breakpoint, reshaping the whole line each time 
> until something fits. Then I’d have to do that all over again for the second 
> line until the entire paragraph is shaped. So to typeset 5 lines of text I’d 
> have to shape about 22 lines of text. To typeset a 20 line paragraph I’d have 
> to shape about 240 lines of text.
> 
> Surely this is not how harfbuzz expects users to use it?
> 
> (Asking because I need harfbuzz for my typesetter app)
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