Uniscribe: The Missing Documentation & Examples. Introduction Microsoft created an extremely powerful API called Uniscribe that allows applications to do typography of scripts that may have complex rules for transforming the input string (a list of Unicode code points) to the proper thing that should be rendered on the screen.
Unfortunately, Microsoft did not document this library very well, gave no examples, and blessed it with an extremely complex API. I have attempted to document and give examples for some aspects of the Uniscribe library that I am familiar with in the hopes that it will be useful to other developers. This document comes from my contribution to getting Uniscribe to work in Google Chrome. Supporting Multilanguage Text Layout and Complex Scripts with Wi. You can implement CreateWindowExU as a function pointer.
When the app is launched, your initialization code checks to see if g_IsWindowsNT is TRUE, and if s, sets CreateWindowExU equal to CreateWindowExW. Otherwise (that is, when running on Windows 95 or Windows 98), CreateWindowExU is set to a routine you write yourself, say CreateWindowsExAU. This routine converts lpClassName and lpWindowName to the ACP using WideCharToMultiByte, and passes those parameters along with everything else to CreateWindowExA.
This approach also requires special handlers for messages such as WM_CHAR and WM_GETTEXT to convert the text passed in the wParam or lParam parameters to or from Unicode when g_IsWindowsNT is false. In the case of WM_CHAR and WM_IME_CHAR when running on Windows 95 and Windows 98, the application will also have to build up the Unicode string from multiple conversions via MultiByteToWideChar if the user switches input locales while typing in text. Part 11 - Introduction to Uniscribe.