A character reference gives the number of the particular Unicode character it represents, in either decimal or hexadecimal. The following example shows a decimal character reference.

Ϩ

This example shows a hexadecimal character reference. Notice that it has an x in front of the hexadecimal number.

Ϩ

The encoding supported by XAML are ASCII, Unicode UTF-16, and UTF-8. The encoding statement is at the beginning of XAML document. If no encoding attribute exists and there is no byte-order, the parser defaults to UTF-8. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are the preferred encodings. UTF-7 is not supported. The following example demonstrates how to specify a UTF-8 encoding in a XAML file.

?xml encoding="UTF-8"?

XAML uses xml:lang to represent the language attribute of an element.  To take advantage of the CultureInfo class, the language attribute value needs to be one of the culture names predefined by CultureInfo. xml:lang is inheritable in the element tree (by XML rules, not necessarily because of dependency property inheritance) and its default value is an empty string if it is not assigned explicitly.

The language attribute is very useful for specifying dialects. For example, French has different spelling, vocabulary, and pronunciation in France, Quebec, Belgium, and Switzerland. Also Chinese, Japanese, and Korean share code points in Unicode, but the ideographic shapes are different and they use totally different fonts.

The following Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) example uses the fr-CA language attribute to specify Canadian French.

<TextBlock xml:lang="fr-CA">Découvrir la France</TextBlock>

XAML supports all Unicode features including surrogates. As long as the character set can be mapped to Unicode, it is supported. For example, GB18030 introduces some characters that are mapped to the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CFK) extension A and B and surrogate pairs, therefore it is fully supported. A WPF application can use StringInfo to manipulate strings without understanding whether they have surrogate pairs or combining characters.

WPF includes built-in processing for all Microsoft .NET Framework supported writing systems.

The following scripts are currently supported:

• Arabic

• Bengali

• Devanagari

• Cyrillic

• Greek

• Gujarati

• Gurmukhi

• Hebrew

• Ideographic scripts

• Kannada

• Lao

• Latin

• Malayalam

• Mongolian

• Oriya

• Syriac

• Tamil

• Telugu

• Thaana

• Thai*

• Tibetan

*In this release the display and editing of Thai text is supported; word breaking is not.

The following scripts are not currently supported:

• Khmer

• Korean Old Hangul

• Myanmar

• Sinhala

All the writing system engines support OpenType fonts. OpenType fonts can include the OpenType layout tables that enable font creators to design better international and high-end typographic fonts. The OpenType font layout tables contain information about glyph substitutions, glyph positioning, justification, and baseline positioning, enabling text-processing applications to improve text layout.

OpenType fonts allow the handling of large glyph sets using Unicode encoding. Such encoding enables broad international support as well as for typographic glyph variants.

WPF text rendering is powered by Microsoft ClearType sub-pixel technology that supports resolution independence. This significantly improves legibility and provides the ability to support high quality magazine style documents for all scripts.

WPF provides a very convenient way to support horizontal, bidirectional, and vertical layouts. In presentation framework the FlowDirection property can be used to define layout. The flow direction patterns are:

• LeftToRight - horizontal layout for Latin, East Asian and so forth.

• RightToLeft - bidirectional for Arabic, Hebrew and so forth.

Multilingual User Interfaces (MUI) is a Microsoft support for switching UIs from one language to another. A WPF application uses the assembly model to support MUI. One application contains language-neutral assemblies as well as language-dependent satellite resource assemblies. The entry point is a managed .EXE in the main assembly. WPF resource loader takes advantage of the Framework's resource manager to support resource lookup and fallback. Multiple language satellite assemblies work with the same main assembly. The resource assembly that is loaded depends on the CurrentUICulture of the current thread.

WPF applications use XAML to define their UI. XAML allows developers to specify a hierarchy of objects with a set of properties and logic. The primary use of XAML is to develop WPF applications but it can be used to specify a hierarchy of any common language runtime (CLR) objects. Most developers use XAML to specify their application's UI and use a programming language such as C# to react to user interaction.

From a resource point of view, a XAML file designed to describe a language-dependent UI is a resource element and therefore its final distribution format must be localizable to support international languages. Because XAML cannot handle events many XAML applications contain blocks of code to do this. For more information, see XAML Overview. Code is stripped out and compiled into different binaries when a XAML file is tokenized into binary XAML (BAML). BAML files, images, and other types of managed resource objects are embedded in the satellite resource assembly, which can be localized into other languages, or the main assembly when localization is not required.

Note:
WPF applications support all the Framework CLR resources including string tables, images, and so forth.

Localization means to adapt a UI to different cultures. To make a WPF application localizable, developers need to build all the localizable resources into a resource assembly. The resource assembly is localized into different languages, and the code-behind uses resource management API to load. One of the files required for a WPF application is a project file (.proj). All resources that you use in your application should be included in the project file. The following example from a .csproj file shows how to do this.

<Resource Include="data\picture1.jpg"/>
<EmbeddedResource Include="data\stringtable.en-US.restext"/>

To use a resource in your application instantiate a ResourceManager and load the resource you want to use. The following example demonstrates how to do this.

void OnClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
  ResourceManager rm = new ResourceManager ("MySampleApp.data.stringtable",
       Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
  Text1.Text = rm.GetString("Message");
}