Summary

Rich Edit provides excellent support as you create world-ready applications. You can use Rich Edit to provide edit controls in a single, worldwide binary to the Windows operating systems. The edit controls can be plaintext or rich text, single or multiline, and can support Unicode and non-Unicode character set encodings. Because Rich Edit is based on Unicode, it has considerable international capability for Western European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, Cyrillic, Indic, and other languages. If you use rich edit controls based on Rich Edit 3 or later, you don't have to worry about handling complex scripts or IMEs, since this kind of support is built into Rich Edit. You also don't have to figure out which fonts to use for Unicode's many characters, since Rich Edit has built-in font binding.

Other international features associated with Rich Edit include Unicode surrogate pairs and interfaces for using rich edit controls. For instance, you can use the Text Object Model interfaces, which are supported by rich edit controls, for plaintext and rich-text manipulation. These extensions allow clients to take advantage of Unicode text handling and font binding in Rich Edit.

When working with Rich Edit, remember to consider font sizing issues. For instance, mixing 8-point Latin characters with 9-point Chinese characters in dialog boxes will result in increased line height, and can cause text to shift up higher than if the dialog box were only designed to handle one language. Moreover, Unicode surrogate pairs, carriage-return line-feeds, and nonspacing combining-mark sequences will require special treatment, both for display and for cursor navigation.