While writing my article on adding subtitles to videos in Silverlight, I found out that Silverlight does not display joined Indic alphabets correctly. For example the following Devanagiri text:

Devanagari script rendered by IE and MSWord

Is displayed as :

Even a person who knows nothing about Indian scripts can spot the difference here. Looks like Silverlight does not use the same rendering engine as IE. This is understandable, considering the portability requirements of this plugin. But I do feel, that this is one feature that should be added to Silverlight.

I had learned  when I was trying to write an Devanagiri transliterator, that Unicode support does not only mean, being able to display letters from different scripts. In fact the Unicode rendering system has to be intelligent enough to detect joins and render appropriate character. Unicode ready font is just part of the system it seems.

There is some very useful information on the subject is given here:
http://unicode.org/faq/indic.html

I hope in coming versions of Silverlight this feature is included !

Posted on September 18th, 2008 under Uncategorized • Tags: Indic, Silverlight, Unicode. • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed