Summary

• Windows 95 introduces a new standard mechanism for dealing with the input and display of multilingual data that links fonts, keyboards, and Windows character sets.
• Using Control Panel, the user can add to a list of input languages and assign each language a default keyboard layout. For example, the user might type English text with a US keyboard and French text with a Canadian keyboard. The system provides hot keys and a menu on the taskbar for switching input languages.
• Applications need to recognize when the user attempts to change the input language and either accept or reject the change, based on information contained in the WM_INPUTLANGCHANGEREQUEST message parameters and based on the properties of the available fonts.
• Windows 95 and Windows NT both support big fonts, which can contain glyphs to represent multiple character sets. Each big font contains a signature to indicate which charset and Unicode ranges the font covers.
• Windows 95 has extended the font enumeration and font selection common dialog API functions to handle the font charset property.
• Windows 95 has generic text layout API functions that analyze and preprocess strings based on font properties and input language rules. These API calls are particularly useful for processing Arabic and Hebrew text.