Is Android Unicode Yet? | Hacker News Reader

Is Android Unicode Yet?

shkspr.mobi

22 pointsedent9 comments

Very odd that this author seems to be conflating Unicode with fonts? I assumed since android is “jvm by another name” it would be utf-16 internally, just like the jvm. Encoding and decoding utf-8 is no problem. But this author is lamenting the incomplete fonts available in google project noto.

To be fair the Noto fonts are a mess and suffer from Google-itis where communication about breaking changes is done poorly, if at all. For instance the author includes Noto Display in the table. However, Noto Display has been deprecated/abandoned with no replacement. The latest version of Noto Display (which is still available depending on where you're looking) has metadata that's just all sorts of wrong.

"Unicode" seems to have (colloquially) taken on the meaning of "complete or extensive language support".

There seem to be some discrepancies between his table and the fonts contained in the repository. For instance, as of this comment the table says Noto Sans Miao Regular is missing from AOSP, but the repository apparently has had this since April 2023 (the author says he looked at the AOSP source code in September 2024):

https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...

Since he didn't link to a specific commit representing the version of AOSP he looked at, it's possible that this font really was added afterwards; I'm not going to go full archaeologist on this one. But at the very least it seems like the table needs another look.

iOS has provided a glyph for ⏻ U+23FB POWER SYMBOL since iOS 14:

https://tofu.quest/?q=%E2%8F%BB

(Full disclosure: I maintain a project that catalogs which Unicode codepoints are covered by the default fonts on iOS and Android ( https://github.com/amake/CodePointCoverage/ ); this feeds tofu.quest which is also my project.)

The Python code is missing an import for ttlib. I'm assuming this comes from fonttools, but there's no easy way to know that for sure in Python.

I wonder if a Magisk module could be used to upgrade these fonts on rooted phones.

>Google's Android platform has dreadful support for Unicode.

Android is based upon the Linux kernel, like all UN*X systems it usually uses UTF-8. I think M/S Windows is based on UNICODE, UTF-16 IIRC.

So maybe he should complain to Microsoft :)

I’d think this has almost literally nothing to do with the kernel.

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