Behdad Esfahbod

Update 2020-08-17: "If you read one thing from me, please be this".

Update 2020-08-16: I have been talking about my current activism on my Twitter mostly, and Medium occasionally. The rest of this website and my old blog are out-dated and currently obsolete.

My name is Behdad. It's roughly pronounced as [beh da:d] [es f@h bo:d] in IPA ASCII transcription. It is a Persian name, natively written as بهداد اسفهبد. I was born and grew up in Iran, and moved to Canada in 2003.

Previous, I was a Software Engineer at the Facebook internationalization team in Seattle. Before that, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, leading fonts and text rendering, in Mountain View, Toronto, and Waterloo. Before that I was part of the Red Hat's desktop team, working from Toronto. And before I was at FarsiWeb in Iran.

I am a huge Free Software enthusiast, and previously worked on the GNOME Project. My long-term goal since late last century has been to make Persian work great in computer software, in particular, in Free Software, though these days my focus is not limited to Persian anymore.

I'm best known as the author of HarfBuzz, which makes it possible to read every language of the world on software like Firefox, Google Chrome, Android, Linux desktop, and elsewhere.

More about me:

• Wikipedia, GitHub, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Maps, CouchSurfing, Google+, Ohloh, Flickr,
• Résumé (shorter PDF version here).
• English weblog: McEs, A Hacker Life, where I write [not anymore] regularly about my day to day life and my work as a Free Software developer.

I wonder if you find what you are looking for here, so feel free to contact me. Contact information is at the end of this page.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
	— some dude

Whitepapers and presentations:

• 2020 HarfBuzz OT+AAT "Unishaper". Slides.
• 2018 Digital Typography. With Nicolas Rougier. Mini-course at SIGGRAPH. Slides.
• 2018 Faster Horse. C++ Font Subsetter: Fast, Flexible, and Secure . Rewriting Python-based FontTools font subsetter in C++ in HarfBuzz. Slides. Video.
• 2018 99 Proof Smal Batch Distillery Rewriting FontTools's GSUB/GPOS table packing. Slides. Video.
• 2017 Update on Font Variations in FontTools & Chrome. I showed how I used calculus, symbolic computation, and code generation, to speed up a design tool by 10x in Python. Slides. Video.
• 2016 OpenType GX, an exploratory proposal Work that led to OpenType 1.8 Font Variations. Slides. Video.
• 2015 Universal Shaping I showed that OpenType Layout format is Turing complete. Slides. Video.
• 2014 Reflections on Building the HarfBuzz Indic Shaper.
• 2014 Unicode, OpenType, and Fonts: Closing the Circle With Roozbeh Pournader. Slides. Video.
• 2014 GLyphy: high-quality glyph rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders. Video.
• 2012 High-DPI, Subpixel Text Positioning, Hinting, What happens when an unstoppable bullet hits an impenetrable wall?.
• 2010 State of Text Rendering. Overdue for an update, still a good read to understand the pieces of the Free Software text rendering stack.

Persian stuff:

• Google Persian Transliteration tool, converting Fargilisi to Persian.
• Join my Persian Computing discussion group.
• Behdad's Editor, with Open and Save functionality now.
• Behdad's Calendar, supports multiple-system calendar as used in Iran. Also reachable at taghvim.info.
• Download the free Persian Nastaliq font IranNastaliq. It's simply gorgeous. Screenshot using Pango here.
• With my friend Pooya, we run the RiRa Persian Digital Library. The database as well as the source code are available at sf.net/projects/rira.
• Khaateraat-e Yek Asb, by Yar-Ali PourMoghaddam. I did the online version (by permission). Strongly recommended.
• The Little Prince the masterpiece by Antoine Saint-Exupery, translated to Persian by Ahmad Shamlou (also vocal). I did the online version (by permission).

• I'm maintaining a mirror of the late Earthreport weblog by Franny Fallacy.
• My old Persian blog The Thin Ice, by Bertrand Elizabeth. And some stuff I worked for Ghasedak are still at Meltin' Ice, by Bertrand Elizabeth.
• Please consider linking to this important page about Farsi [sic].
• Ghasedak was an online magazine published by Iranian students in Toronto. I used to be in the editorial board. I'm maintaining the archive now.
• Chris de Burgh's Spanish Train translated to Persian by me is here.

Projects I develop / maintain:

• HarfBuzz: the Free Unicode+OpenType text shaping library. This is what I spend most of my hacking time on these days. I take credit for naming this one.
• GLyphy: high-quality text rendering using OpenGL ES2 shaders.
• Fontconfig: library for font customization and configuration.
• Pango: the GNOME Unicode text rendering library.
• gucharmap: the GNOME Unicode character map.
• vte: the GNOME terminal emulation widget.
• GNU FriBidi: an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (bidi).
• preload: an adaptive readahead daemon.

Projects I contribute to, in alphabetical order:

• The FarsiTeX Project
• The FarsiWeb Project
• The Fedora Project
• The Freedesktop.org Projects (Cairo graphics, Fontconfig, HarfBuzz)
• The GNOME Project. More about my GNOME involvement here.
• The GNU Project (GNU FriBidi)
• The Unicode Standard

Downloads:

• Download directory, contains presentations, publications, course projects, etc. (including my BSc FarsiTeX thesis and my MSc preload thesis)
• Nibbles, my favorite game, ever! (latest version by Mohammad Toossi, for Dos, 60KB)

Friends and Family on the Web:

• My friend Pouria started Café Pamenar in the heart of Toronto's hip Kensington Market. Drop by when you're around.
• My brother Behnam. He also maintains esfahbod.info.
• Older sister Bahareh.

Contact:

Email me to behdad at behdad dot org.