Script and Font Support in WindowsSince before Windows 2000, text-display support for new scripts has been added in each major release of Windows. This article describes changes made in each major release. Note that support for a script may require certain changes to text stack components as well as changes to fonts. The Windows operating system has many text stack components: DirectWrite, GDI, Uniscribe, GDI+, WPF, RichEdit, ComCtl32, and others. The information provided here pertains primarily to GDI and DirectWrite. It is also generally applicable to UI frameworks such as RichEdit or the MSHTML rendering agent used for Windows 8 Metro style apps and for rendering Web content, though those components may exhibit certain differences. Comments on language usage are included in cases in which associations between scripts and languages may not be well known. The list of languages for any given script is not necessarily exhaustive. On This Page
Windows 2000Windows 2000 was the first version of the Windows operating system that included the Uniscribe component, usp10.dll. (The lpk.dll library, which provides the interfaces between Uniscribe and various GDI and User APIs, was also added.) Functional benefits of Uniscribe included:
Support for basic Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and CJK existed with APIs in Windows NT 4.0 and Windows ME. ("Basic" here means no combining marks, and Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane only.) In relation to complex scripts, support for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai existed in previous versions and was consolidated in Windows 2000 in the Uniscribe component. Various GDI mechanisms that may have originated in East Asian versions (font association, EUDC font support, and "JPN98FixPitch" display mode) were all present in the consolidated code base for Windows 2000. The following table lists scripts newly supported in Windows 2000, and associated fonts:
In a default setup, not all scripts are necessarily enabled. In the Regional Options control panel (intl.cpl), the General tab includes a list of sixteen language/script categories (“language groups”) that can be individually enabled or disabled. (The language group for the UI language cannot be disabled, however.) When a language group is enabled, various support files are copied from the CD, including fonts; in the case of "complex-script" language groups (Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Thai, and Vietnamese), registry entries to activate Uniscribe are also added. The sixteen language groups available on Windows 2000 are: Arabic, Armenian, Baltic, Central European, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Indic, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkic, Vietnamese, Western Europe and United States. For more details, see the Configurable Language and Cultural Settings topic. A surrogates shaping engine was also added to Uniscribe to allow display of Unicode supplementary-plane characters in the GDI text stack. (GDI supports wide characters but does not understand UTF-16 surrogate pairs.) See the Surrogates and Supplementary Characters topic for details on the extent of support for supplementary-plan characters. Windows 2000 did not include fonts for any supplementary-plane characters. Windows XPThe following table lists scripts newly supported in Windows XP, and associated fonts:
The font fallback mechanism in Uniscribe was extended to support fallback for Unicode supplementary planes: for each plane from 1 to 16, a single fallback font can be specified in the registry. This change, along with earlier changes in Windows 2000, to support supplementary-plane characters allows Windows XP to support CJK Extension B characters. Note: all of the scripts mentioned are supported on Windows XP, but enablement is not activated for all of them on all language versions of Windows XP. The Regional and Language Options control panel (intl.cpl) has two option controls: one to enable "complex script and right-to-left languages" (Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, Indic scripts and Thai), and one to enable CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Each of these may be enabled or disabled by default, depending on the language version. CJK fonts are not installed by default on non-CJK versions but are included in the distrbution media and will be installed when CJK support is enabled. Windows XP SP2The following table lists scripts newly supported in Windows XP SP2, and associated fonts:
As with Windows XP (RTM), the Regional and Language Options control panel (intl.cpl) has two option controls to enable "complex script and right-to-left languages" (Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, Indic scripts and Thai) and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). One effect of these options is to enable the Uniscribe component within the text stack. Whereas in the RTM version, Uniscribe is not enabled by default in all SKUs, in SP2 it is always enabled by default. Windows VistaThe following table lists scripts newly supported in Windows Vista, and associated fonts:
In Windows Vista and later versions, text-display support for all scripts and languages is always enabled in all editions. Character coverage for several already-supported scripts was extended to Unicode 4.1 or 5.0. Several fonts were updated accordingly. In particular, support for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic was extended in the "core" fonts:
(The new Aero-theme UI font, Segoe UI, also provides Unicode 5.0 support for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic.) Unicode 5.0 additions were also made to other Arabic fonts as well as several of the Indic-script fonts. Extension B fonts for the SimSun and MingLiU families were added, as well as a variation of MingLiU with HKSCS support. The Uighur language uses Arabic script, which was already supported. However, a different font is required for Uighur typography. The Microsoft Uighur font was added to support this. Uniscribe's font fallback mechanism for Unicode supplementary planes was enhanced to support different fallback fonts depending on the starting font. In this way, fallback for CJK Extension B characters uses appropriate fonts for the given language. For example, for UI displayed using the SimSun font (Simplified Chinese), the fallback font for Extension B is SimSun-ExtB. New APIs were added to Uniscribe to support OpenType advanced typographic functionality in non-complex scripts. This provides a way for clients to expose advanced font capabilities such as language-specific glyphs; discretionary ligatures; true typographic small caps, superscripts and subscripts; old-style as well as tabular digits. Windows Vista includes the Cambria Math font, which has additional tables used to support layout of mathematical formulas. Special software support is also required to render math formulas, however. This is provided in Microsoft Office 2007, but not in Windows Vista text-stack components. Prior to Windows Vista, Uniscribe had Arabic, Hebrew and Thai shaping engines that worked with legacy, pre-OpenType fonts, but not for fonts that support those scripts using OpenType glyph substitution and positioning mechanisms. The versions of fonts for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai that shipped in Windows Vista were changed to use OpenType. This means that those fonts will not work with earlier versions of Uniscribe. Windows 7The following table lists scripts newly supported in Windows 7, and associated fonts:
Note: The Segoe UI Symbol font contains a subset of Unicode-encoded symbols. It is not a symbol charset-encoded font. In Windows 7, some true bold fonts were added to support better UI display for Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil and Telugu script. Some fonts for already-supported scripts were updated to include support for Unicode 5.1. Windows 7 added support for Unicode variation-selector sequences for Phags-pa script and math symbols. This support makes use of OpenType format 14 cmap subtables in Microsoft PhagsPa and Cambria Math fonts. As part of on-going work to provide next-generation graphics, Windows 7 introduced a new text stack, DirectWrite. The OpenType and complex-script functionality that has been part of Uniscribe was fully integrated into the DirectWrite text stack with the result that the DirectWrite and GDI text stacks have complete parity in script and language support. Windows 8The following table lists scripts newly supported in Windows 8, and associated fonts:
Some significant changes were introduced into Unicode version 5.2 in relation to the encoding of Old Hangul text. These changes enable products that can support Korean Standard KS X 1026-1:2007. In earlier versions of Windows, Uniscribe included support for shaping Old Hangul text, though not in accordance with the KS X 1026-1:2007 standard. In Windows 8, Uniscribe and DirectWrite provide suport for Old Hangul text in accordance with the Korean standard, and font support for Old Hangul text is also now included. In Windows 7, Unicode variation sequences were supported for certain scenarios only. In Windows 8, Unicode variation sequences are fully supported in GDI and DirectWrite text stacks. In particular, ideographic variation sequences used in Japan are supported, and the Japanese fonts in Windows 8 support a number of ideographic variation sequences. For certain previously-supported scripts, the fonts used for the Windows user interface were changed in Windows 8. In some cases, support for a scripts was added to an existing font (such as Segoe UI); in other cases, entirely new UI fonts for those scripts were added. The UI font changes are as follows:
Among additional fonts added for previously-supported scripts is the Urdu Typesetting font, which supports Arabic script in Nastaliq style (sometimes referred to as Perso-Arabic script). In Windows 7, the Segoe UI Symbol font was added to provide support for many symbols encoded in Unicode. This font has been significantly updated in Windows 8 to support many more symbols, including complete support for Emoji characters used in Japan and elsewhere. Among other significant updates to fonts from Windows 7 is the addition of support for CJK Extension C and Extension D characters in the SimSun-ExtB and MingLiU-ExtB fonts. In Windows 7, both Uniscribe and DirectWrite provided support for OpenType advanced typographic capabilities, including OpenType features, such as typographic small caps or stylistic sets, and language specific forms. This functionality was not supported in Windows UI frameworks, however. As a result, advanced typographic capabilities were never visible in the Windows shell and were not well supported in applications. These capabilities are better supported in Windows 8, enabling higher quality typography in the Windows Metro style shell and in Metro style apps developed for Windows 8. The CSS3 -ms-font-feature-settings property exposes OpenType capabilities and is supported in the MSHTML rendering engine used by IE10 and Metro style apps built for Windows using HTML and JavaScript. For XAML, advanced OpenType capabilities that were supported in WPF and Silverlight are also supported in the Windows Runtime XAML framework. |
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