As more and more people are using computers across the world, and more people who don't necessarily speak English or Latin based languages start using computers, it became important for developers to make sure that their applications have support for more languages than before.

One of the hardest parts of handling many languages in the same code stream is the different ways these languages are represented when processed for display, width measuring, text highlighting, justification and cursor movements. During this presentation I'll be describing the different behaviour of various language scripts that an application designer must be aware of before development start writing the code for the application.

I'll describe some language features like BiDirectional text flow, Contextual Shaping, Ligatures, Word Breaking, Diacritics, and Justification and how these operations are different across languages. I'll show examples of such features and mention some of the Operating System support for these features that exist under the Microsoft Windows OS.