Support full Unicode for all languages and scripts | Hacker News Reader

Support full Unicode for all languages and scripts

code.google.com

12 pointssbashyal5 comments

An interesting font I use from time to time when I need to do multilingual work:

While quite ugly, (it's bitmap based) it contains 43,149 glyphs and weighs in at 10MB. You won't see any square boxes in this one.

Incidentally, the size if this starts to show why downloadable web fonts are not a viable solution for some non-latin sites.

I built a mobile app and while testing the app on Android devices, I found that many scripts (e.g. Devanagari) are not rendered by Android devices.

I find it surprising that there isn't an easy way for users to read text in certain fonts. Am I missing something?

This has been partially rectified in ICS. Some Indic scripts, such as Devanagari, Bengali, and Tamil, are functional, while others, such as Malayalam, are not. It's certainly appalling that a device designed in a post-Unicode world would even have this problem to begin with.

Is that really so appalling..

I mean, stop to think for a moment. If there are Indic scripts there is probably an RTL handler et al. right? And they're working on implementing more complex font rendering.

But at the end of the day they have to load in thousands upon thousands of symbols and glyphs from many different cultures, either in open fonts or creating the fonts themselves so they can assure proper legibility and that the display looks like Android.

Doing that is no small task. I think it may have actually been easier for Apple, considering that the iPhone uses the Helvetica font that Apple has been working with for years.

Unicode is no small task, and though I agree they need to pay a lot more attention and put a lot more work into it we shouldn't underestimate how much work proper unicode support is.

I refuse to use any operating system without glyphs for Unicode symbols such as Police Car's Revolving Light (U+1F6A8), See No Evil Monkey (U+1F648), Moyai (U+1F5FF), Love Hotel (U+1F3E9), and American Football (U+1F3C8).

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