Great to see more work in this space. Diversity of font parsing and shaping engines is important to make sure the ecosystem doesn't become reliant on bug-for-bug compatibility with the existing engines. (It's dangerously close already, due to the quirks of DirectWrite, GDI, and FreeType.)
So cool, I was going to ask what was the relationship with something like pathfinder [1], but you already addressed it in your github README.
Thanks for contributing in this space
[1] https://github.com/servo/pathfinder/blob/master/README.md
Cool. Are you in contact with the Runebender devs at all?
Obligatory article: Text Rendering Hates You [0][1]
I used Prince for everything I wrote in grad school. A truly beautiful PDF maker. It's cool that they're releasing part of it.
How does this compare to harfbuzz?
I'm curious about why they decided to develop Allsorts instead of just using Harfbuzz.
This would certainly be beneficial for the XeTeX "oxidation" efforts[1] for fonts parsing and shaping[2]. There is also a number of existing alternatives: font-kit[3], Skribo[4], RustType[5], ttf-parser[6]. Some of them are just parsers, some - font shapers. Still all of them are relevant to the subject.
[1] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic
[2] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues/117
[3] https://github.com/servo/font-kit
[4] https://github.com/linebender/skribo
[5] https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/rusttype/
[6] https://github.com/RazrFalcon/ttf-parser