Install fribidi with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• fribidi

Project history

FriBidi was first developed by Dov Grobgeld of the Ivrix project in late 2000, with early releases up to 0.1.15. Behdad Esfahbod began hacking on it around the same period through the FarsiWeb project, moved development to SourceForge, became maintainer in early 2001, and focused on standards compliance and GNU coding conventions.

The project released FriBidi 0.9.0 on 2001-03-29, followed by stabilization work that led to 0.10.4 in 2002. Richard Stallman dubbed it a GNU package in 2002, and the project later lived at FreeDesktop before moving to its current GitHub home.

Adoption history

The README says FriBidi was already being used by projects such as Pango, GTK+, GNOME, AbiWord, MLTerm, MPlayer, BiCon, and VLC. The official USERS file lists additional terminal emulators, text rendering systems, editors, word processors, media players, and desktop components that used FriBidi for bidirectional text or right-to-left subtitle rendering.

The HISTORY file notes that the stable 0.10.4 line had been shipped by several distributions since 2003, making FriBidi one of the small infrastructure libraries that quietly entered many Unix-like systems through desktop, font, terminal, and media stacks.

How it is used

Programmers typically use FriBidi through library calls such as `fribidi_log2vis` or lower-level bidi-type, embedding-level, and reorder functions. The package also ships a `fribidi` command-line utility that processes text line by line and is used for testing the algorithm.

Why package nerds care

FriBidi is significant because it is a tiny but central internationalization dependency. Package maintainers encounter it not as an end-user application but as a text-layout primitive underneath terminals, media players, GUI toolkits, subtitle renderers, and document applications.

It is also a classic example of packaging Unicode data-driven C code: the library extracts character properties from Unicode data files and aims to track the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm rather than inventing a separate policy.

Timeline

• 2000: Dov Grobgeld starts FriBidi in the Ivrix project.
• 2001: Behdad Esfahbod moves development forward on SourceForge and releases FriBidi 0.9.0 on 2001-03-29.
• 2002: FriBidi 0.10.4 is released, and Richard Stallman identifies it as a GNU package.
• 2003: The stable 0.10.4 line is reported as shipping in several distributions.
• 2010s-2020s: Development continues from the FreeDesktop era to the GitHub repository, with the 1.0 series maintained there.

Related projects

• Related upstream standards and data sources include Unicode Standard Annex #9 and Unicode character data.
• Related consumers named by the project include Pango, GTK+, GNOME, AbiWord, MLTerm, MPlayer, BiCon, VLC, m17nlib, and terminal or desktop components that need bidirectional text.

Sources

• https://github.com/fribidi/fribidi/releases
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fribidi/fribidi/master/HISTORY
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fribidi/fribidi/master/README.md
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fribidi/fribidi/master/USERS