HexaPDF 1.9.0 - Text shaping et al. Published on Sunday, 07 June 2026

There hasn’t been a news entry for quite some time. So this post details the newest changes in HexaPDF 1.9.0 as well as higlights some of the more important ones of the past releases.

The most notable additions and changes of 1.9.0 are:

• The document layout engine now supports text shaping by using the great HarfBuzz library! This means that by using a TrueType font and setting the new shaping_engine style property it is now possible to use all OpenType features a font provides.

  The following image illustrates the difference (above without, below with HarfBuzz):

  

  This will now allow a wide range of scripts to be correctly shown.

• The HexaPDF::Layout::TableBox now supports breaking table cells. This means that very high cells don’t lead to a fit error anymore.

• The ink annotation (sometimes called “scribble” annotation) is now supported, including appearance generation.

Additionally, HexaPDF gained some other nice features recently:

• Importing pages is now possible with a special task that supports preserving the optional content configuration and interactive form fields.

• There is now a Page#extract_text method (see HexaPDF::Content::SmartTextExtractor for details) for extracting the text from pages that preserves the overall layout of the text.

• The annotation types Polygon, Polyline, Square, Circle, and Line are fully supported with appearance generation.

As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of all changes.