Summary

Uniscribe, a rich technology with regard to typography in multilingual text, offers considerable assistance as you create a world-ready application. Namely, it enables Unicode text to be displayed in all Microsoft-supported scripts and languages, and supplies a script-independent interface for writing applications that display or edit formatted text. In addition, this technology offers simple font fallback for all languages as well as support for OpenType typographic features.

Uniscribe presents a broad range of international support for typographic issues such as kerning. When you use Uniscribe to display text, kerning specified by a font's GPOS table as well as standard ligatures are applied automatically. Uniscribe also provides support for combining marks, which range from the accent marks utilized in Western Europe to the far more complex combinations found in Indic scripts. In addition, it manages bidirectional character reordering using the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. Support for RTL and LTR reading order and for the many-to-many relationship between characters and glyphs are further benefits of this technology. Finally, Uniscribe provides APIs that retrieve the caret position associated with the leading and trailing edges of any character, and that identify the character edge nearest to any pixel offset. For many of the challenges that multilingual text and its typography can present, Uniscribe provides not only a viable but an optimal solution.