First two chapters. More to follow.

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+<sect1 id="what-is-harfbuzz">
+  <title>What is Harfbuzz?</title>
+  <para>
+    Harfbuzz is a <emphasis>text shaping engine</emphasis>. It solves
+    the problem of selecting and positioning glyphs from a font given a
+    Unicode string.
+  </para>
+  <sect2 id="why-do-i-need-it">
+    <title>Why do I need it?</title>
+    <para>
+      Text shaping is an integral part of preparing text for display. It
+      is a fairly low level operation; Harfbuzz is used directly by
+      graphic rendering libraries such as Pango, and the layout engines
+      in Firefox, LibreOffice and Chromium. Unless you are
+      <emphasis>writing</emphasis> one of these layout engines yourself,
+      you will probably not need to use Harfbuzz - normally higher level
+      libraries will turn text into glyphs for you.
+    </para>
+    <para>
+      However, if you <emphasis>are</emphasis> writing a layout engine
+      or graphics library yourself, you will need to perform text
+      shaping, and this is where Harfbuzz can help you. Here are some
+      reasons why you need it:
+    </para>
+    <itemizedlist>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          OpenType fonts contain a set of glyphs, indexed by glyph ID.
+          The glyph ID within the font does not necessarily relate to a
+          Unicode codepoint. For instance, some fonts have the letter
+          &quot;a&quot; as glyph ID 1. To pull the right glyph out of
+          the font in order to display it, you need to consult a table
+          within the font (the &quot;cmap&quot; table) which maps
+          Unicode codepoints to glyph IDs. Text shaping turns codepoints
+          into glyph IDs.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          Many OpenType fonts contain ligatures: combinations of
+          characters which are rendered together. For instance, it's
+          common for the <literal>fi</literal> combination to appear in
+          print as the single ligature &quot;fi&quot;. Whether you should
+          render text as <literal>fi</literal> or &quot;fi&quot; does not
+          depend on the input text, but on the capabilities of the font
+          and the level of ligature application you wish to perform.
+          Text shaping involves querying the font's ligature tables and
+          determining what substitutions should be made.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          While ligatures like &quot;fi&quot; are typographic
+          refinements, some languages <emphasis>require</emphasis> such
+          substitutions to be made in order to display text correctly.
+          In Tamil, when the letter &quot;TTA&quot; (ட) letter is
+          followed by &quot;U&quot; (உ), the combination should appear
+          as the single glyph &quot;டு&quot;. The sequence of Unicode
+          characters &quot;டஉ&quot; needs to be rendered as a single
+          glyph from the font - text shaping chooses the correct glyph
+          from the sequence of characters provided.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          Similarly, each Arabic character has four different variants:
+          within a font, there will be glyphs for the initial, medial,
+          final, and isolated forms of each letter. Unicode only encodes
+          one codepoint per character, and so a Unicode string will not
+          tell you which glyph to use. Text shaping chooses the correct
+          form of the letter and returns the correct glyph from the font
+          that you need to render.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          Other languages have marks and accents which need to be
+          rendered in certain positions around a base character. For
+          instance, the Moldovan language has the Cyrillic letter
+          &quot;zhe&quot; (ж) with a breve accent, like so: ӂ. Some
+          fonts will contain this character as an individual glyph,
+          whereas other fonts will not contain a zhe-with-breve glyph
+          but expect the rendering engine to form the character by
+          overlaying the two glyphs ж and ˘. Where you should draw the
+          combining breve depends on the height of the preceding glyph.
+          Again, for Arabic, the correct positioning of vowel marks
+          depends on the height of the character on which you are
+          placing the mark. Text shaping tells you whether you have a
+          precomposed glyph within your font or if you need to compose a
+          glyph yourself out of combining marks, and if so, where to
+          position those marks.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+    </itemizedlist>
+    <para>
+      If this is something that you need to do, then you need a text
+      shaping engine: you could use Uniscribe if you are using Windows;
+      you could use CoreText on OS X; or you could use Harfbuzz. In the
+      rest of this manual, we are going to assume that you are the
+      implementor of a text layout engine.
+    </para>
+  </sect2>
+  <sect2 id="why-is-it-called-harfbuzz">
+    <title>Why is it called Harfbuzz?</title>
+    <para>
+      Harfbuzz began its life as text shaping code within the FreeType
+      project, (and you will see references to the FreeType authors
+      within the source code copyright declarations) but was then
+      abstracted out to its own project. This project is maintained by
+      Behdad Esfahbod, and named Harfbuzz. Originally, it was a shaping
+      engine for OpenType fonts - &quot;Harfbuzz&quot; is the Persian
+      for &quot;open type&quot;.
+    </para>
+  </sect2>
+</sect1>
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diff --git a/docs/usermanual-ch02.xml b/docs/usermanual-ch02.xml
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+<sect1 id="hello-harfbuzz">
+  <title>Hello, Harfbuzz</title>
+  <para>
+    Here's the simplest Harfbuzz that can possibly work. We will improve
+    it later.
+  </para>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem>
+      <para>
+        Create a buffer and put your text in it.
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting language="C">
+  #include &lt;hb.h&gt;
+  hb_buffer_t *buf;
+  buf = hb_buffer_create();
+  hb_buffer_add_utf8(buf, text, strlen(text), 0, strlen(text));
+</programlisting>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem override="2">
+      <para>
+        Guess the script, language and direction of the buffer.
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting language="C">
+  hb_buffer_guess_segment_properties(buf);
+</programlisting>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem override="3">
+      <para>
+        Create a face and a font, using FreeType for now.
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting language="C">
+  #include &lt;hb-ft.h&gt;
+  FT_New_Face(ft_library, font_path, index, &amp;face)
+  hb_font_t *font = hb_ft_font_create(face);
+</programlisting>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem override="4">
+      <para>
+        Shape!
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting>
+  hb_shape(font, buf, NULL, 0);
+</programlisting>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem override="5">
+      <para>
+        Get the glyph and position information.
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting language="C">
+  hb_glyph_info_t *glyph_info    = hb_buffer_get_glyph_infos(buf, &amp;glyph_count);
+  hb_glyph_position_t *glyph_pos = hb_buffer_get_glyph_positions(buf, &amp;glyph_count);
+</programlisting>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem override="6">
+      <para>
+        Iterate over each glyph.
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting language="C">
+  for (i = 0; i &lt; glyph_count; ++i) {
+    glyphid = glyph_info[i].codepoint;
+    x_offset = glyph_pos[i].x_offset / 64.0;
+    y_offset = glyph_pos[i].y_offset / 64.0;
+    x_advance = glyph_pos[i].x_advance / 64.0;
+    y_advance = glyph_pos[i].y_advance / 64.0;
+    draw_glyph(glyphid, cursor_x + x_offset, cursor_y + y_offset);
+    cursor_x += x_advance;
+    cursor_y += y_advance;
+  }
+</programlisting>
+  <orderedlist numeration="arabic">
+    <listitem override="7">
+      <para>
+        Tidy up.
+      </para>
+    </listitem>
+  </orderedlist>
+  <programlisting language="C">
+  hb_buffer_destroy(buf);
+  hb_font_destroy(hb_ft_font);
+</programlisting>
+  <sect2 id="what-harfbuzz-doesnt-do">
+    <title>What Harfbuzz doesn't do</title>
+    <para>
+      The code above will take a UTF8 string, shape it, and give you the
+      information required to lay it out correctly on a single
+      horizontal (or vertical) line using the font provided. That is the
+      extent of Harfbuzz's responsibility.
+    </para>
+    <para>
+      If you are implementing a text layout engine you may have other
+      responsibilities, that Harfbuzz will not help you with:
+    </para>
+    <itemizedlist>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          Harfbuzz won't help you with bidirectionality. If you want to
+          lay out text with mixed Hebrew and English, you will need to
+          ensure that the buffer provided to Harfbuzz has those
+          characters in the correct layout order. This will be different
+          from the logical order in which the Unicode text is stored. In
+          other words, the user will hit the keys in the following
+          sequence:
+        </para>
+        <programlisting>
+A B C [space] ג ב א [space] D E F
+        </programlisting>
+        <para>
+          but will expect to see in the output:
+        </para>
+        <programlisting>
+ABC אבג DEF
+        </programlisting>
+        <para>
+          This reordering is called <emphasis>bidi processing</emphasis>
+          (&quot;bidi&quot; is short for bidirectional), and there's an
+          algorithm as an annex to the Unicode Standard which tells you how
+          to reorder a string from logical order into presentation order.
+          Before sending your string to Harfbuzz, you may need to apply the
+          bidi algorithm to it. Libraries such as ICU and fribidi can do
+          this for you.
+        </para>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          Harfbuzz won't help you with text that contains different font
+          properties. For instance, if you have the string &quot;a
+          <emphasis>huge</emphasis> breakfast&quot;, and you expect
+          &quot;huge&quot; to be italic, you will need to send three
+          strings to Harfbuzz: <literal>a</literal>, in your Roman font;
+          <literal>huge</literal> using your italic font; and
+          <literal>breakfast</literal> using your Roman font again.
+          Similarly if you change font, font size, script, language or
+          direction within your string, you will need to shape each run
+          independently and then output them independently. Harfbuzz
+          expects to shape a run of characters sharing the same
+          properties.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+      <listitem>
+        <para>
+          Harfbuzz won't help you with line breaking, hyphenation or
+          justification. As mentioned above, it lays out the string
+          along a <emphasis>single line</emphasis> of, notionally,
+          infinite length. If you want to find out where the potential
+          word, sentence and line break points are in your text, you
+          could use the ICU library's break iterator functions.
+        </para>
+        <para>
+          Harfbuzz can tell you how wide a shaped piece of text is, which is
+          useful input to a justification algorithm, but it knows nothing
+          about paragraphs, lines or line lengths. Nor will it adjust the
+          space between words to fit them proportionally into a line. If you
+          want to layout text in paragraphs, you will probably want to send
+          each word of your text to Harfbuzz to determine its shaped width
+          after glyph substitutions, then work out how many words will fit
+          on a line, and then finally output each word of the line separated
+          by a space of the correct size to fully justify the paragraph.
+        </para>
+      </listitem>
+    </itemizedlist>
+    <para>
+      As a layout engine implementor, Harfbuzz will help you with the
+      interface between your text and your font, and that's something
+      that you'll need - what you then do with the glyphs that your font
+      returns is up to you. The example we saw above enough to get us
+      started using Harfbuzz. Now we are going to use the remainder of
+      Harfbuzz's API to refine that example and improve our text shaping
+      capabilities.
+    </para>
+  </sect2>
+</sect1>
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