[smc-discuss] Malayalam in Android 4.0

[Siji Sunny]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Jishnu <jishnu7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't know whether it is appropriate to post here or not.
>
> Here are some sceenshots of Ice Cream Sandwich web-browser.
>
> https://picasaweb.google.com/jishnu7/DropBox?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNb8wMv-1LTj7gE&feat=directlink
>
> It is showing/rendering Malayalam perfectly for websites which are
> font embedded and other websites are showing nothing as content. I
> tried to replace the fallback font. But still complex script rendering
> is not available. (by the way, ICS supports hindi and even have a
> language pack.).
>

I have been working with android for getting Indic support and had some
experiments with various phones and development boards.And the result was
really interesting.

Here some of my findings

Initially I have experimented with Samsung Galaxy(froyo) fit without
rooting and it's having the support for Hindi in browser and even in
applications too.But other indian languages are displaying as square boxes.
Then I rooted the device and while exploring in the font path, realised
that only Hindi font is there (DroidHindi.ttf).So I have replaced the
DroidHindi with a Tamil Unicode font and browser and the sample application
with Tamil text (Menu's Buttons etc) rendered properly.
But while tried with Malayalam it's failed to do the character level
reordering.So assumes character level reordering algorithm is not
implemented for malayalam and may be for some other languages.

Since the source code of samsung android built is not available, I have
tried with ICS in pandaboard and in the font path three indic fonts are
there.
Lohit Devanagari
Lohit Tamil
And Lohit Bengali.

But rendering (combinations and re-ordering ) is not happening with any of
the three languages.

Trying to fix those issue, will update you soon.






> How it render complex scripts for web embedded fonts but not for internal
> font ?
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Siji Sunny
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