For tarball releases of HarfBuzz, look here. At the same place you will also find Win32 binary bundles that include libharfbuzz DLL, hb-view.exe, hb-shape.exe, and all dependencies. The canonical source tree is available here. Also available on github. The API that comes with hb.h will not change incompatibly. Other, peripheral, headers are more likely to go through minor modifications, but again, will do our best to never change API in an incompatible way. We will never break the ABI. If you are not sure whether Pango or HarfBuzz is right for you, read this.

On Linux, install the development packages for FreeType, Cairo, and GLib. For example, on Ubuntu / Debian, you would do: sudo apt-get install gcc g++ libfreetype6-dev libglib2.0-dev libcairo2-dev whereas on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and other Red Hat based systems you would do: sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ freetype-devel glib2-devel cairo-devel or using MacPorts: sudo port install freetype glib2 cairo If you are using a tarball, you can now proceed to running configure and make as with any other standard package. That should leave you with a shared library in src/, and a few utility programs including hb-view and hb-shape under util/. If you are bootstrapping from git, you need a few more tools before you can run autogen.sh for the first time. Namely, pkg-config and ragel. Again, on Ubuntu / Debian: sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config ragel gtk-doc-tools and on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS: sudo yum install autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig ragel gtk-doc or using MacPorts: sudo port install autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig ragel gtk-doc