To enable HarfBuzz bindings for Python among other languages, make sure you have latest version of gobject-introspection available. On Ubuntu, you can install that this way:

sudo apt-get install libgirepository1.0-dev

And then run meson setup and make sure that Introspection is reported enabled in output.

If you are building with Visual Studio, it is recommended that Visual Studio 2019 or later is used for this build, for the best build experience.

Compile and install.

Make sure you have the installation lib dir in LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or the installation DLL dir in PATH for Windows systems), as needed for the linker to find the library.

Then make sure you also have GI_TYPELIB_PATH pointing to the resulting $prefix/lib/girepository-* directory.

Make sure you have pygobject installed. Then check that the following import works in your Python interpreter:

from gi.repository import HarfBuzz

If it does, you are ready to call HarfBuzz from Python! Congratulations. See src/sample.py.

The Python API will change. Let us know on the mailing list if you are using it, and send lots of feedback.