We're quite excited about our upcoming WPF 3.5 release which will now support seven Indic scripts!!

For those of you curious about what languages this implies, here's a mapping between scripts, languages, and fonts:

For other new upcoming features, check out Tim Sneath's blog.

Note: Indic script support is not available in the current public Beta, it will be available in the final release.

 -Chris Han

Thanks to all who attended TypeCon's Fonts and Typography in WPF workshop. We had a great time chatting with you all Thursday morning. In the below zip file you can find some of the material we went over in the lab. This includes:

1. The extremely useful WPF Layout and Font Quick Reference which lists and describes common typography and text layout related properties.

2. The completed version of the reflective textbox lab

3. Mikhail Leonov's presentation on WPF font model.

Also here are a couple links that may be helpful:

WPF Typography SDK page:http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742190.aspx 

The Sample OpenType Font Pack: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms746705.aspx

WPF forums: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=119&siteid=1

-Christine Ahonen, Chris Han, Mikhail Leonov, and Simon Daniels

Hi everyone,

our team is seeking a strong developer to help us design and deliver world-class text processing components for the newer versions of Microsoft Windows.

To apply, please follow this link - http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=33E1258A-46D7-4CA5-94D4-6BB426792B19

Thanks for your interest, and best regards,

Mikhail Leonov

WPF Text team

Unrelated to text, but extremely cool...

 Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once talked about putting a PC on every desk. Now Gates is talking about turning the desk itself — or a tabletop — into a computer. Microsoft is set to announce an ambitious new computing category today called "surface computing" to try to make it happen.

The initiative, several years in the making, transforms an ordinary tabletop into a translucent, interactive façade. The surface can recognize cellphones, digital cameras, special ID-coded digital dominoes and other physical objects.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-05-29-microsoft-surface_N.htm

You may have seen people on the subway or bus reading the New York Times on a tablet PC.  You might even use the reader yourself.  The reader has gotten some really impressive adoption since launching not long ago.  But you probably haven't seen anyone enjoying this amazing online/offline reading experience on a Macintosh.  Macintosh users aren't shy about pulling out their machines in public places, but the New York Times Reader hasn't been available for Mac.

Now that Silverlight is coming to the Mac, things are beginning to change.  Take a look at this demo of the New York Times Reader running in Safari on a Macintosh! 

A video interview of Kevin Gjerstad and I demonstrating a prototype of the Times Reader using Silverlight just got posted yesterday on the VisitMix front page, check it out.

-Chris Han

I hope some of you who are attending MIX were able to attend this talk this morning. If not, here's a short summary of the chat along with some screen shots of the Silverlight Times Reader prototype that was demo'ed during the talk.

• Kevin Gjerstad, Group Program Manager of WPF, walked through some of the history of typography, the problems with reading today on screen, and how WPF aims to address those problems with features like multi-column layout, pagination, dynamic hyphenation, and optimal paragraph.
  
• Robert Larson, VP of Product Development at the New York Times, walked through the WPF based Times Reader and the business model that they're employing with it. Also, the most exciting part -- at least for me -- was hearing about their user metrics. The most staggering statistic is that there's a average 7x increase in user page views when compared to the web site!
• Warrick Fitzgerald, CTO at LiveTechnology, demonstrated WPF adaptive ads produced from their LiveAdMaker system. This system automates and drastically reduces the cost of producing WPF based ads that adapt to the ad space that they're given in the Times Reader.
• Then Nathan Dunlap, Senior Iteractive Designer at IdentityMine, joined everyone on stage for an open panel Q&A.

One of the demos Kevin showed was a technology prototype using Silverlight to present the New York Times Reader. This prototype was shown on a Mac in Safari but can run on any device and browser Silverlight supports. The prototype uses a server side pre-pagination technique that sends down the content and layout data via XMLHttpRequest from a web server down to a client.

 Here are some screen shots of it:

We'd love to get your feedback on this prototype. If you're here at MIX, stop by the sandbox and come find me if you want to take a closer look or chat about it.

Happy MIX'in,

Chris Han
 

Hi,
my name is Mikhail Leonov, I'm a developer on the WPF Text team.

WPF introduces a new font selection model that allows applications to select fonts using FontFamily, FontWeight, FontStyle and FontStretch properties. Customers often need to know how the information stored in the font files is mapped to these properties by the WPF engine, so we wrote a white paper that contains detailed explanation of the font mapping process in WPF. I hope this paper is useful to developers and font designers, and I'm looking forward to your feedback. The attached copy of the paper is in the PDF format, but I can also upload XPS and DOCX versions if needed.

Best regards,
Mikhail Leonov - MSFT

Fil Fortes has restarted blogging on WPF flow & text topics. Lots of good posts including a bindable run conrol and discussions about inline: http://fortes.com

.NET 3.0 is now available in XP SP2 as an optional windows software update, probably the quickest and easiest way to install it!

-Chris Han

Tim Sneath has just started an 'Intro to great WPF apps' series starting with the British Library's XBAP for viewing historical books. It's all using bitmaps and not text but it's a very fun app: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/default.aspx.

"The British Library have digitized the pages of fifteen of their most valuable works and created Turning the Pages, a browser-based WPF application that allows you to interact with these books in a virtual environment from the comfort of your home. You can open a book on your desktop and by clicking on a page, physically turn it in a 3D environment. You can zoom or pan around each of the pages; the page turns themselves are created by modeling the actually deformation of different types of material (for example, a book with vellum pages is far heavier than something printed on paper, so you'll actually see the page start to collapse under its own weight)."

-Chris Han

Dot Net Solutions created a fun Wikipedia explorer app that takes Wikipedia content and displays it in a WPF FlowDocument and also adds in a 3D topic explorer. Fun app that ou can install through click-once here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/casestudies/wikipediaexplorer/.

Lorin on our SDK team just posted a great sample on how to use FormattedText to create fun decorative text. Check it out: http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2006/12/24/using-text-as-a-decorative-graphic.aspx

-Chris Han

[ Reposting, as this entry got deleted accidentally. Aplogies if you've seen this before! ] 

One thing we didn’t have time to include in the first release of WPF is a set of predefined dialogs analogous to the Win32 common dialogs. Attached to this article is a sample application that might help you implement your own font chooser.

This is not the first font chooser posted to this blog. Norris posted a XAML-only version in June, which was an impressive demonstration of how much can be accomplished in just a few lines of XAML with data binding. This version is not as admirably brief but is more full-featured, including not just family and typeface but text decorations, font information, and all the typographic properties. Here is a screen shot:

Note that you could get away with using the Win32 common dialogs for file-open, etc., but fonts are different because the font selection model is different in WPF than in GDI. For a good example of this, look at the Arial font family in the sample font chooser and in Notepad’s font dialog box.

In WPF (i.e., the sample font chooser), Arial includes the typefaces Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Narrow, and Black, plus the simulated faces Oblique, Bold Oblique, Narrow Oblique, and Black Oblique. In GDI (i.e., Notepad’s font dialog box), Arial includes just Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. The narrow faces are treated as a separate font family (“Arial Narrow”) because GDI doesn’t allow members of a font family to be differentiated by width. Likewise, the black faces are treated as a separate font family (“Arial Black”) because GDI supports only two weights with a family: bold and not-bold.

The attached sample code is provided as is. I won't promise it's perfect, but I hope it helps you get started. Enjoy!

--Niklas Borson

If you've ever wondered why this happens Seema, a program manager on the WPF team, wrote a great post about what we're doing: http://blogs.msdn.com/seema/.

 -Chris Han