It’s been more than a week since my last post so you may be forgiven for thinking that the blog novelty has worn off, but not so 🙂 Over the last week or so I have been working on building the GNU FriBidi and HarfBuzz engines under Windows using Visual Studio rather than MSYS and MinGW. Been rather short of time recently but today I got them both to build. GNU FriBidi provides support for bidirectional text (e.g., Hebrew or Arabic mixed with English) and HarfBuzz provides an OpenType text-shaping engine for complex scripts. In theory, GNU FriBidi and HarfBuzz could be plugged into LuaTeX to provide typesetting solutions for languages such as Arabic or any other complex script that the HarfBuzz engine provides support for. So, the next step is to create a Lua binding for FriBidi and HarfBuzz and figure out the best way to communicate with the LuaTeX engine. Once I have some working code I’ll post some further notes based on what I find out. Stay tuned…