pop-os/cosmic-text

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2133 stars · 204 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

cosmic-text is a pure Rust library providing advanced multi-line text handling, including shaping (via HarfRust), font discovery and fallback, bidirectional layout, rasterization (via swash), and text editing abstractions. It supports Linux, macOS, and Windows with full features, plus partial no_std support.

Use cases

• render text with proper shaping in a Rust GUI application
• handle bidirectional and RTL text layout
• implement font fallback for multilingual text rendering
• build a text editor widget with selection and editing support
• rasterize glyphs with ligatures and color emoji
• lay out and wrap multi-line text in a custom rendering engine
• support complex scripts like Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese in an app

When to choose

• you need production-grade text shaping and layout in pure Rust
• your application must render multilingual or bidirectional text correctly
• you are building a GUI toolkit, editor, or game UI that needs text rendering
• you want per-character font fallback similar to browser behavior

When to avoid

• you only need simple single-line text rendering without shaping
• you are not using Rust or a Rust-compatible FFI layer
• you need full no_std font loading or rendering, which is still incomplete
• you need copy/paste support, which is not yet implemented

Facets

library · maturity active

nlp graphics parser text-editors graphics cross-platform windows rust cross-platform embedded text-shaping text-layout font-fallback bidirectional-text rust-library glyph-rasterization text-editing no-std localization linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="pop-os/cosmic-text")