So back in Unicode 4.1, Unicode added ஶ ( U+0bb6 , aka TAMIL LETTER SHA). Then there was a {ahem} brief delay, after which Vista shipped. For the record, the Latha font was updated prior to ship. . Two points for Microsoft Typography! Originally I thought that was the point of this blog. Pointing this fact out. Though this does require one to have >= Vista. In the words of someone with the nickname shrii on the Microsoft VOLT User's Community: ...I did figure out that ETTamilNew font works fine

Now regular readers know I have talked about the FONTSIGNATURE structure and the LOCALESIGNATURE structure in the past, starting way back in 2005 in blogs like Parameter confusion #2a and It isn't a FONTSIGNATURE, darn it! , both of which refer to the confusion between the two structures and some of the consequences thereof. At the same time many offhand observations were made, though without too much follow-up. Time to dig in a little deeper! To start, the FONTSIGNATURE structure looks like this:

Now I have talked about the good, the bad, the ugly, the pretty, the ins, and the outs of digit substitution many times over the past few years: 01 December 2004 -- Crossing the DIGITal divide... 24 April 2005 -- Is Whidbey's international support finished? 09 July 2005 -- Why doesn't FoldString take an LCID? 09 September 2005 -- Figuring out when digit substitution is applied 18 January 2006 -- Digits -- there is no substitute 22 February 2006 -- And the digits just keep on coming 26 April 2006

So it was actually a couple of days ago (in the blog titled What a tangled web we weave when a KLID from an HKL we must receive ) that I painted a picture that would cause any normal, sane developer charged with working with keyboard layouts to either run out of the room screaming or to collapse into despair, convinced that Microsoft designed all of this exclusively to make their lives more difficult. Lucky for us that so few normal, sane developers around these parts! :-) Now as a responsible blog

This blog is about CultureTypes. The list can be kind of confusing, perhaps even a bit daunting to people. But it all makes sense, if you know where it came from. Thus this blog! The full list of members of the CultureTypes enumeration are: Member name Description NeutralCultures Cultures that are associated with a language but are not specific to a country/region. The names of .NET Framework cultures consist of the lowercase two-letter code derived from ISO 639-1. For example: "en" (English) is

It was a little more than two years ago in When the font is the boss of you that I talked about how the ClearType font Meiryo took the battle between people who try to italicize Japanese text and people who think that this makes Japanese really really ugly, and took steps to make it no longer a problem. Through the relatively simple trick of providing an italic version of font which does not slant the Kana or Kanji in it (in a .TTC so that glyphs could be shared with the non-italicized version),

So, I had that Behind the Proposed Change to Tamil in Unicode presentation: The encoding of Tamil within Unicode has been the subject of displeasure by the government of Tamil Nadu for as long as it has been there. It has led to a proposal (built up over the last decade) to try to change the way that Unicode looks at Tamil, and the very real questions of why this effort has been so persistent and what will eventually happen have not really been discussed overtly in all of this time. This presentation's

The other kind of MAC, in this case. :-) Another from the list of bugs from that cool presentation from the folks over in Intel localization.... This one is kind of about Bidi. Wait. Scratch that. It is all about Bidi. First some info from Loïc describing the screenshots: There are 2 screenshots using Hebrew settings, 1 using Arabic. I must say those have so far puzzled our developers, and I wish we could set some sort of override for those MAC address fields. They're passed properly among applications,

Martin asks: Hello Mr. Michael! I've a problem with Arabic (FARSI) unicode. I searched all the web many days - without success. I also posted to a newsgroup (microsoft.public.de.vc) and there they couldn't help me by answering my question, but the linked me to you. So I was visiting your side, and I think .. They are right! "If anybody can help you, then M. Kaplan!" So I hope you can, and you feel like helping me - of course ok if not. My problem: I've an access db (mdb). There is one field with

A couple of days ago over on the VOLT Users Community, John Hudson pointed out some important updates that have happened for Indic fonts: Microsoft have posted the new versions of their Indic font specs, which include changes for Vista and Office 2007 shaping and new script tags (older shaping is still supported, and by using both old and new tags it is possible to make fonts that will be take advantage of the improved shaping but still be backwards compatible). Updates to the Bengali, Gujarati and