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Originally Posted by mc_03
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My inspiration comes from couple of threads down the page in which some people have gone to great lengths to get Japanese support in WM5. Hebrew can't be that much harder... can it?
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I'm afraid it is indeed much harder. Hebrew is considered a "complex" script, whereas Japanese is not. Complex being that the script sometimes changes form or it is bi-directional. Arabic, for example, is also complex script because the alphabet changes form when in a different position in a word. Japanese may have thousands and thousands of characters, but programmatically, the script does not need special handling.
Uniscribe is the engine that does character shaping and the special handling for complex scripts. It is available on desktop Windows system, and also Windows CE. But because there is no Hebrew, or Arabic WM SKU, Uniscribe is not included into WM systems.
What this means is that enabling support for these scripts are much harder since the OS will not be able to handle them correctly, applications need to do these themselves.