This is a challenging task, one which most people don’t need to worry about because their language is already supported, but for millions of people around the world getting basic text support has been a problem. The stumbling block in most such cases is a little-known component called a “shaping engine”. A shaping engine is used for so-called, which is needed for about half of the world’s writing systems.
For many years, Windows customers have been able to install their own fonts and but before Windows 10, if there was no shaping engine for your script things wouldn’t look right. Correct: N’ko script with a shaping engine. In order to get things to look right, that is, to get a complex script to render correctly on Windows, linguists and software engineers had to take time to study all of the features and requirements of that script and craft a shaping engine that would provide the necessary support. This meant that just a small number of new writing systems could be added in any release of Windows. By Windows 8.1, it had taken around 15 years to build shaping engines for 27 of the most widely used complex writing systems.