Silverlight 5 (and WPF 4) OpenType Support

I like fonts. I like fonts that are visibly pleasing as well as easy to read. While not as skilled or knowledgeable as some of my designer friends, I'm a bit of a typography geek. For that reason, I'm very excited about all the new OpenType support built into Silverlight 5.

    Note: While I happen to be using Silverlight here,  these features are also built into WPF 4. Check them out!

Scott Hanselman wrote a great post about using ligatures with the Gabriola font in Microsoft Word. It's exciting to me to see much of this same functionality included in the latest version of Silverlight. My examples here all use the Gabriola font included with Windows 7.
Ligatures

Ligatures are the connections between letters. This requires an awareness of the characters before and after a given character in order to allow those connections.

    Correction (thanks Damien!) Ligatures aren't actually connections between letters in the literal sense - they are specialized glyphs that contain more than one letter and are used to substitute two individual glyphs in a specific sequence.

Here is the standard rendering of the text "Microsoft Silverlight" using the Gabriola font. Pay special attention to the f and t in Microsoft.

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">

    <TextBlock Text="Microsoft Silverlight"

                HorizontalAlignment="Center"

                FontSize="175"

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