Nathan Willis
Documentation And Specification Specialist
Abilene, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Willis is a Documentation and Specification Specialist with 12 years of experience translating complex software and typographic systems into clear, usable documentation and standards. Based in Abilene, Texas, he blends deep typographic expertise—backed by a PhD and a master’s in typeface design—with practical software skills from a long history of freelance work and open-source contributions. He has contributed to HarfBuzz, improving Indic script shaping logic, and brings rare domain knowledge at the intersection of font technology, text rendering, and developer-facing APIs. His background in journalism, math, and computer science gives him a disciplined, analytical approach to specification writing and technical communication. Colleagues rely on him to convert research and intricate implementation details into precise, implementable guidance for engineers and designers.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Journalism, MS, Journalism at Abilene Christian UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Typography & Graphic Communication, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Typography & Graphic Communication at University of Reading
Github Skills (5)
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
typography10
unicode9
opentype9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
harfbuzz/harfbuzz
Jan 2016 - Apr 2020
HarfBuzz text shaping engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 119 commits, 25 PRs in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nathan's contributions focused on refining the Indic shaping behavior within the HarfBuzz text shaping engine. They made code changes that specifically involved replacing the term 'cluster' with 'syllable' in the comments and code related to Indic shaping. Additionally, the user modified the hyphenation process, ensuring pre-base-reordering consonants are always hyphenated for improved clarity. These changes primarily targeted the complex shaping logic for Indic scripts, impacting the text-rendering features of the library.
harfbuzzopentypefontsc-plus-plusc
n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents
Sep 2017 - Jan 2023
Documentation of OpenType shaping behavior
Contributions:9 reviews, 697 commits, 84 PRs in 5 years 4 months
opentypeopentype-fontsopentype-featuresunicodecomplex-scripts
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