Silverlight™ 3 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 6. Silverlight Text

Although the graphical browser has made the Web a powerful platform for expressing ideas using complex imagery, a core function of the Web remains to disseminate information, and text remains a primary mechanism to achieve this function. The basic text capabilities of HTML and CSS have improved dramatically, allowing designers significant control over the layout and appearance of the text displayed in their web sites. Silverlight provides a designer with many of the same powerful capabilities of HTML and CSS, and extends those basic capabilities with even more functionality that can dramatically enhance designers' abilities to control, to a fine point, the way their web sites deliver their textual information.

This chapter looks at the basic mechanisms included in Silverlight for displaying and formatting text.

Text Support in Silverlight

Silverlight provides basic support for text directly in the platform. By default, Silverlight uses the Portable User Interface font, which is a composite font that uses several different fonts to implement characters for the full range of international languages supported by Silverlight. The font is primarily composed of Lucida Grand, which is used for most Western writing systems, and many other fonts used for East Asian support.

Silverlight also includes support for 10 other local system Latin fonts (see Figure 6-1).

Figure 6.1. Figure ...