Uniscribe

Uniscribe is the Microsoft Windows set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text, supporting complex text layout. It is implemented in the dynamic link library USP10.DLL. Uniscribe was released with Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0. In addition, the Windows CE platform has supported Uniscribe since version 5.0.

"USP" is an initialism for Unicode Scripts Processor. Its features include:

  • arranging input text from the input sequence to visual sequence;
  • substituting glyphs according to context (e.g., different forms of Arabic characters);
  • ordering displayed text based on text flow direction, such as left-to-right or right-to left, horizontal or vertical.

Although Uniscribe continues to be maintained as of 2021, its intended replacement DirectWrite, which has more features, was introduced with Windows 7.[1]

  1. ^ "Windows 7: Introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite". Channel 9. PDC2008. Microsoft Corp. 2008-10-29. Retrieved 2021-06-01.