How to change default system font on Windows 10

Source: Windows Central

On Windows 10, you can change the default system font, but you now have to make changes to the Registry to complete this task.

In older versions like Windows 7, the Control Panel included personalization settings to change the system font for many visual elements on the desktop, such as File Explorer, icons, title bars, menus, message boxes, and more. However, for some reason, Windows 10 removed these settings, and you are now stuck with the default system font.

However, it is possible to change the «Segoe UI» default font on Windows 10, if that is something you want to do. Now, it just takes a few more steps using the Registry.

In this Windows 10 guide, we will walk you through the steps to change the default system font for most desktop elements.

How to change default font on Windows 10

To change the system font on Windows 10, use these steps:

Warning: This is a friendly reminder that editing the Registry is risky and can cause irreversible damage to your installation if you don’t do it correctly. It’s recommended to make a full backup of your PC before proceeding. Alternatively, you can create a system restore point, which will also help you revert the changes.

1. Open Start.
2. Search for Notepad and click the top result to open the text editor.

Copy and paste the following Registry code onto the file:

Select the font family you want to use.

Source: Windows Central

Note the official name of the font family – for example, Courier New.

Source: Windows Central

In the Notepad text with the Registry code, replace «NEW-FONT-NAME» with the name of the font you want to use in the entire system – for example, Courier New.

Source: Windows Central

Use the «Save as type» drop-down menu and select the All Files option.

Source: Windows Central

Right-click the newly created «.reg» file and select the Merge option.

Source: Windows Central

Click the Yes button.

Click the OK button.

Restart the computer.

Once you complete the steps, the new font should be available throughout the desktop visual elements, including File Explorer, message box, taskbar, and apps that use the system default font settings.

Although you can select from a lot of different fonts, it is recommended to choose a style that is easy to understand since fonts like Webdings or Wingdings use symbols, and they can cause issues to the installation.

How to restore default system font on Windows 10

If you change your mind, you can always restore the previous settings using the Registry or using a restore point.

Undo settings with Registry

To restore the default font settings on Windows 10, use these steps:

1. Open Start.
2. Search for Notepad and click the top result to open the text editor.

Copy and paste the following Registry code onto the file:

Use the «Save as type» drop-down menu and select the All Files option.

Source: Windows Central

Right-click the newly created «.reg» file and select the Merge option.

Source: Windows Central

Click the Yes button.

Click the OK button.

After you complete the steps, the Windows 10 default font should rollback to the previous configuration.

Undo settings with Restore point

Alternatively, you could also use a previous restore point created before modifying the font settings to undo the changes. However, use this option as a last resort, since depending on when you are restoring the system, the feature may also undo other system changes you may have configured after the restore point was created.

To undo system changes, use these steps:

1. Open Start.
2. Search for Create a restore point and select the top result to open the app.
3. Click the System Protection tab.

Click the System Restore button.

Source: Windows Central

Select the restore point you created before applying the settings.

Source: Windows Central

Click the Next button.

Click the Finish button.

Once you complete the steps, the system will need to be restarted to finish the process.

More Windows 10 resources

For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources:

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Font and Text Functions (Windows GDI)

The following functions are used with fonts and text.

Function	Description
AddFontMemResourceEx	Adds an embedded font to the system font table.
AddFontResource	Adds a font resource to the system font table.
AddFontResourceEx	Adds a private or non-enumerable font to the system font table.
CreateFont	Creates a logical font.
CreateFontIndirect	Creates a logical font from a structure.
CreateFontIndirectEx	Creates a logical font from a structure.
DrawText	Draws formatted text in a rectangle.
DrawTextEx	Draws formatted text in rectangle.
EnumFontFamExProc	An application definedcallback function used with EnumFontFamiliesEx to process fonts.
EnumFontFamiliesEx	Enumerates all fonts in the system with certain characteristics.
ExtTextOut	Draws a character string.
GetAspectRatioFilterEx	Gets the setting for the aspect-ratio filter.
GetCharABCWidths	Gets the widths of consecutive characters from the TrueType font.
GetCharABCWidthsFloat	Gets the widths of consecutive characters from the current font.
GetCharABCWidthsI	Gets the widths of consecutive glyph indices or from an array of glyph indices from the TrueType font.
GetCharacterPlacement	Gets information about a character string.
GetCharWidth32	Gets the widths of consecutive characters from the current font.
GetCharWidthFloat	Gets the fractional widths of consecutive characters from the current font.
GetCharWidthI	Gets the widths of consecutive glyph indices or an array of glyph indices from the current font.
GetFontData	Gets metric data for a TrueType font.
GetFontLanguageInfo	Returns information about the selected font for a display context.
GetFontUnicodeRanges	Tells which Unicode characters are supported by a font.
GetGlyphIndices	Translates a string into an array of glyph indices.
GetGlyphOutline	Gets the outline or bitmap for a character in the TrueType font.
GetKerningPairs	Gets the character-kerning pairs for a font.
GetOutlineTextMetrics	Gets text metrics for TrueType fonts.
GetRasterizerCaps	Tells whether TrueType fonts are installed.
GetTabbedTextExtent	Computes the width and height of a character string, including tabs.
GetTextAlign	Gets the text-alignment setting for a device context.
GetTextCharacterExtra	Gets the current intercharacter spacing for a device context.
GetTextColor	Gets the text color for a device context.
GetTextExtentExPoint	Gets the number of characters in a string that will fit within a space.
GetTextExtentExPointI	Gets the number of glyph indices that will fit within a space.
GetTextExtentPoint32	Computes the width and height of a string of text.
GetTextExtentPointI	Computes the width and height of an array of glyph indices.
GetTextFace	Gets the name of the font that is selected into a device context.
GetTextMetrics	Fills a buffer with the metrics for a font.
PolyTextOut	Draws several strings using the font and text colors in a device context.
RemoveFontMemResourceEx	Removes a font whose source was embedded in a document from the system font table.
RemoveFontResource	Removes the fonts in a file from the system font table.
RemoveFontResourceEx	Removes a private or non-enumerable font from the system font table.
SetMapperFlags	Alters the algorithm used to map logical fonts to physical fonts.
SetTextAlign	Sets the text-alignment flags for a device context.
SetTextCharacterExtra	Sets the intercharacter spacing.
SetTextColor	Sets the text color for a device context.
SetTextJustification	Specifies the amount of space the system should add to the break characters in a string.
TabbedTextOut	Writes a character string at a location, expanding tabs to specified values.
TextOut	Writes a character string at a location.

Obsolete Functions

These functions are provided only for compatibility with 16-bit versions of Windows.

Script and Font Support in Windows

Since before WindowsВ 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 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

WindowsВ 10

WindowsВ 10 converges the Windows platform for use across multiple device categories. The description above of previous releases applies to Windows Client (desktop) and Server editions. This section on WindowsВ 10 covers all WindowsВ 10 editions, including Desktop, Server and Mobile.

All WindowsВ 10 editions support the same set of scripts. In addition to the scripts supported in earlier Windows releases, WindowsВ 10 adds support for several additional, historic scripts. These are supported using the new Segoe UI Historic font:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Brahmi	Indian subcontinent	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Carian	Europe	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Cypriot	Europe	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Egyptian Hieroglyphs	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Imperial Aramaic	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Inscriptional Pahlavi	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Inscriptional Parthian	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Kharoshthi	Indian subcontinent	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Lycian	Europe	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Lydian	Europe	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Phoenician	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Old Persian Cuneiform	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Old South Arabian	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Shavian	Europe	Segoe UI Historic	English phonetic writing
Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic
Ugaritic Cuneiform	Middle East	Segoe UI Historic	Historic

Certain other historic scripts were supported in earlier versions in the Segoe UI Symbol font. In order to avoid duplication, the following scripts have been removed from Segoe UI Symbol and included in Segoe UI Historic:

• Glagolitic
• Gothic
• Meroitic Cursive
• Ogham
• Old Italic
• Orkhon
• Runic

In Windows 8.1, the Meiryo UI font family was used for Japanese text in the Windows user interface. On Windows Phone 8.1, the popular Yu Gothic font was used for Japanese. In Windows 10, the user interface font family for Japanese has changed to Yu Gothic UI for all editions. In order to make Yu Gothic UI perform as intended in Windows UI, Yu Gothic UI is adapted from Yu Gothic with certain metric and character width modifications as well as alternate glyphs for Latin characters. For non-UI content, the Yu Gothic fonts are still included. For optimal readability, the OpenType “palt” feature (proportional alternate widths) should be enabled for text formatted with Yu Gothic.

Another change pertaining to user interface fonts is that a semilight weight has been added to the Malgun Gothic family. Otherwise, user interface fonts for other languages are the same as in WindowsВ 8.1.

In WindowsВ 8 and WindowsВ 8.1, private-use-characters in the Segoe UI Symbol font were used for user interface iconography. In WindowsВ 10, the Segoe MDL2 Assets font has been added to provide newer iconography.

An important development in WindowsВ 10 is the Universal Windows Platform (UWP): a converged app platform allowing a developer to create a single app that can run on all Windows devices. Windows fonts are one aspect of this convergence: WindowsВ 10 introduces a recommended UWP font set that is common across all editions that support UWP, including Desktop, Server, Mobile and Xbox.

For information regarding which fonts are included in the recommended Microsoft font set, complete details are provided in Guidelines for fonts. One important point to note is that the recommended font set does not include all of the weights for certain font families. In particular, due to the large size of East Asian fonts, only the regular weight of East Asian font families are included in the recommended font set.

A number of additional fonts are available for Desktop and Server, including all other fonts from previous releases. However, not all of these are pre-installed by default in all images. In order to make disk usage and font choices more relevant to users according to the languages that they use, a number of fonts have been moved into optional, on-demand packages. These packages are designed around the different scripts that fonts are primarily intended to support, and most are installed automatically by Windows Update when the associated languages are enabled in language settings (for example, by enabling a keyboard).

Any of these optional font packages can also be installed manually by any user in Settings. One package is not triggered automatically but can be added by enabling it in Settings. To add font packages manually, go to Settings > System > Installed apps > Manage optional features.

The following are the optional font packages that are automatically installed based on changes to language settings:

• Arabic Script Supplemental Fonts
• Bangla Script Supplemental Fonts
• Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Supplemental Fonts
• Cherokee Supplemental Fonts
• Chinese (Simplified) Supplemental Fonts
• Chinese (Traditional) Supplemental Fonts
• Devanagari Supplemental Fonts
• Ethiopic Supplemental Fonts
• Gujarati Supplemental Fonts
• Gurmukhi Supplemental Fonts
• Hebrew Supplemental Fonts
• Japanese Supplemental Fonts
• Khmer Supplemental Fonts
• Kannada Supplemental Fonts
• Korean Supplemental Fonts
• Lao Supplemental Fonts
• Malayalam Supplemental Fonts
• Odia Supplemental Fonts
• Sinhala Supplemental Fonts
• Syriac Supplemental Fonts
• Tamil Supplemental Fonts
• Telugu Supplemental Fonts
• Thai Supplemental Fonts

The following optional font package must be installed manually:

• Pan-European Supplemental Fonts

Note: These optional packages are for Desktop and Server editions only.

Moving these fonts into optional packages provides over 220 MB of disk savings for users who don’t require these fonts.

Another significant international development in Windows 10 is the introduction of a new complex-script shaping engine — the Universal Shaping Engine — that allows any complex script in Unicode 7.0 to be shaped correctly even if the script is not yet supported by a system-provided font. Users have the option to install a suitable OpenType font for correct shaping behavior for any script in Unicode 7.0.

Note: While the Windows platform is able to support display of additional Unicode 7.0 scripts using non-system fonts, this doesn’t not guarantee that this will work in all apps. In particular, apps that do their own low-level text-display processing may not display a script correctly unless they were explicitly designed to support that script, even if they call platform APIs that use the universal shaping engine. Also note that platform frameworks will not provide font fallback behavior using non-system fonts.

The following complex scripts in Unicode 7.0 are supported in the Universal Shaping Engine.

Balinese, Batak, Brahmi, Buginese, Buhid, Chakma, Cham, Duployan, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Grantha, Hanunoo, Javanese, Kaithi, Kayah Li, Kharoshthi, Khojki, Khudawadi, Lepcha, Limbu, Mahajani, Mandaic, Manichaean, Meitei Mayek, Modi, Mongolian, N’Ko, Pahawh Hmong, Phags-pa, Psalter Pahlavi, Rejang, Saurashtra, Sharada, Siddham, Sinhala, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Tai Tham, Tai Viet, Takri, Tibetan, Tifinagh, Tirhuta

Other scripts in Unicode 7.0 either are supported in other shaping engines or do not require complex script handling.

WindowsВ 8.1

The following table lists scripts newly supported in WindowsВ 8.1, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Buginese	Southeast Asia	Leelawadee UI	Buginese
Coptic	Middle East	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic
Javanese	Southeast Asia	Javanese Text	Javanese
Meroitic Cursive	Middle East	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic
Ol Chiki	Indian Subcontinent	Nirmala UI	Santali
Sora Sompeng	Indian Subcontinent	Nirmala UI	Sora

For the previously-supported Khmer, Lao and Thai scripts, the fonts used for the Windows user interface were changed in WindowsВ 8.1:

• Khmer: the WindowsВ 8 UI font was Khmer UI; WindowsВ 8.1 uses Leelawadee UI
• Lao: the WindowsВ 8 UI font was Lao UI; WindowsВ 8.1 uses Leelawadee UI
• Thai: the WindowsВ 8 UI font was Leelawadee; WindowsВ 8.1 uses Leelawadee UI

Also, for several font families, new weights were added to extend the font weight options for content and app creators:

• Microsoft JhengHei UI: added Light weight
• Microsoft YaHei UI: added Light weight
• Nirmala UI: added Semilight weight
• Myanmar Text: added Bold weight
• Segoe UI: Black and Black Italic weights added (Latin, Greek and Cyrillic only)

Character coverage for previously-supported Arabic and Hebrew scripts was extended in several fonts to include all characters in Unicode 6.2:

• Arabic script: Arial, Courier New, Microsoft Sans Serif, Segoe UI, Tahoma, Times New Roman
• Hebrew script: Aharoni Bold, Arial, Courier New, David, FrankRuehl, Levinim MT, Microsoft Sans Serif, Miriam, Miriam Fixed, Rod, Segoe UI, Tahoma, Times New Roman

A significant font addition is the Segoe UI Emoji font, and color font support. Color fonts use an extension to the OpenType font specification. Color font rendering using the Segoe UI Emoji font allows emoji symbol characters to be displayed using full-color glyphs that are also scalable because they use TrueType glyph outlines. Color emoji display is supported in the DWrite text stack and enabled by default in the HTML and XAML application UI frameworks used for Windows Store apps and in the Windows shell.

Another addition in WindowsВ 8.1 is a collection of fonts with members optimized for different optical sizes: Sitka Small, Sitka Text, Sitka Subheading, Sitka Heading, Sitka Display, and Sitka Banner. These fonts are designed to be used together in documents with elements at different sizes to provide readability and typographic consistency. The Sitka fonts have basic Latin, Greek and Cyrillic coverage. They are intended for use for print or on-screen content, but not for UI.

WindowsВ 8

The following table lists scripts newly supported in WindowsВ 8, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Glagolitic	Europe	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic
Gothic	Europe	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic
Old Hangul	East Asia	Malgun Gothic	Historic, used in historic Korean texts
Old Italic	Europe	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic
Lisu	China, Southeast Asia	Segoe UI	Lisu
Myanmar	Southeast Asia	Myanmar Text	Myanmar, Shan, Karen
N’Ko	Africa	Ebrima	N’Ko and other Manding languages
Orkhon	China	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic

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 WindowsВ 8, Uniscribe and DirectWrite provide support for Old Hangul text in accordance with the Korean standard, and font support for Old Hangul text is also now included.

In WindowsВ 7, Unicode variation sequences were supported for certain scenarios only. In WindowsВ 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 WindowsВ 8 support a number of ideographic variation sequences.

For certain previously-supported scripts, the fonts used for the Windows user interface were changed in WindowsВ 8. In some cases, support for a script 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:

• Ebrima font: updated to add support for Ethiopic and NКјKo scripts
• Gadugi font: new font for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and Cherokee scripts
• Microsoft JhengHei UI: new font for Traditional Chinese script
• Microsoft YaHei UI: new font for Simplified Chinese script
• Nirmala UI: new font for South Asian scripts (Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Malayalam, Odia, Telugu)
• Segoe UI (certain weights): updated to add support for Arabic, Armenian, Georgian (Mkhedruli), Georgian Khutsuri, Hebrew scripts

Among additional fonts added for previously-supported scripts is the Urdu Typesetting font, which supports Arabic script in Nastaliq style (sometimes referred to as В Perso-Arabic script ).

In WindowsВ 7, the Segoe UI Symbol font was added to provide support for many symbols encoded in Unicode. This font has been significantly updated in WindowsВ 8 to support many more symbols, including complete support for Emoji characters used in Japan and elsewhere.

Among other significant updates to fonts from WindowsВ 7 is the addition of support for CJK Extension C and Extension D characters in the SimSun-ExtB and MingLiU-ExtB fonts.

In WindowsВ 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 WindowsВ 8, enabling higher quality typography in the Windows Store apps developed for WindowsВ 8. The CSS3 -ms-font-feature-settings property exposes OpenType capabilities and is supported in the MSHTML rendering engine used by IE10 and Windows Store apps built 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.

WindowsВ 7

The following table lists scripts newly supported in WindowsВ 7, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Braille	Segoe UI Symbol
Deseret	North America	Segoe UI Symbol
New Tai Lue	China	Microsoft New Tai Lue	Used for the Xishuangbanna Dai language
Ogham	Europe	Segoe UI Symbol	Historic, used for English and Irish
Osmanya	Africa	Ebrima	Historic script from East Africa (Somalia)
Phags-pa	North Asia	Microsoft PhagsPa	Historic, used for several languages including Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit
Runic	Europe	Segoe UI Symbol
Symbols	Segoe UI Symbol
Tai Le	China	Microsoft Tai Le	Used for the Dehong Dai language
Tifinagh	Africa	Ebrima	Used for Tamazight and other Amazigh languages
Vai	Africa	Ebrima

Note: The Segoe UI Symbol font contains a subset of Unicode-encoded symbols. It is not a symbol charset-encoded font.

In WindowsВ 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.

WindowsВ 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, WindowsВ 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.

WindowsВ Vista

The following table lists scripts newly supported in WindowsВ Vista, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Canadian Syllabics	North America	Euphemia	Used for several languages, including Inuktitut and Cree
Cherokee	North America	Plantagenet
Ethiopic	Africa	Nyala	Used for Amharic, Tigrinya, and other languages
Khmer	Southeast Asia	DaunPenh MoolBoran
Lao	Southeast Asia	DokChampa
Mongolian	North Asia	Mongolian Baiti
Odia	Indian subcontinent	Kalinga
Sinhala	Indian subcontinent	Iskoola Pota
Tibetan	Central Asia	Microsoft Himalaya
Yi	China	Microsoft Yi Baiti

In WindowsВ 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:

• Arial
• Courier New
• Microsoft Sans Serif
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman

(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.

WindowsВ 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 OfficeВ 2007, but not in WindowsВ Vista text-stack components.

Prior to WindowsВ 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 WindowsВ Vista were changed to use OpenType. This means that those fonts will not work with earlier versions of Uniscribe.

WindowsВ XPВ SP2

The following table lists scripts newly supported in WindowsВ XPВ SP2, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Bangla	Indian subcontinent	Vrinda	Used for the Assamese language as well as Bangla
Malayalam	Indian subcontinent	Kartika

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.

WindowsВ XP

The following table lists scripts newly supported in WindowsВ XP, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Gujarati	Indian subcontinent	Shruti
Gurmukhi	Indian subcontinent	Raavi	Used in India for the Punjabi language
Kannada	Indian subcontinent	Tunga
Syriac	Middle East	Estrangelo Edessa
Telugu	Indian subcontinent	Gautami
Thaana	Indian subcontinent	MV Boli	Used for the Divehi language

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 WindowsВ 2000, to support supplementary-plane characters allows WindowsВ 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 distribution media and will be installed when CJK support is enabled.

WindowsВ 2000

WindowsВ 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:

• Shaping support for complex scripts such as Arabic and Thai were brought together in a single library, allowing all language versions of WindowsВ 2000 to be built from a single source and to display text in any supported script. (Previously, text-display support for particular languages was added to localized versions.)
• Some new complex scripts were supported.
• Font fallback for different scripts was provided. (This is done in Uniscribe ScriptString* APIs that are typically used in UI components.)

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 WindowsВ 2000, and associated fonts:

New scripts	Region where script is from	Fonts	Comments on language usage
Armenian	Eurasia	Sylfaen
Devanagari	Indian subcontinent	Mangal	Used for many languages including Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit
Georgian	Eurasia	Sylfaen
Tamil	Indian subcontinent	Latha

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 WindowsВ 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.

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 Surrogate Pairs and Variation Selectors topic for details on the extent of support for supplementary-plan characters. WindowsВ 2000 did not include fonts for any supplementary-plane characters.