लेखन

A lot of Android devices, platforms and apps have several issues regarding rendering of non-English text especially that of Indic text. Though many of them claim to support various Indic and other languages, it usually either means that they have a font for that language included or they have some of the native apps supporting all these languages. But this does not mean all the app will be able to render the non-English text properly. This usually happens for one of the following problem being present: 1. No fonts added in the device (or the native android system) 2. Fonts are not accessible by the third party application 3. App has its own Unicode font, but the native android system does not support text layout rendering for the language 4. App has the font and the android system also supports the language, but the sdk for the particular platform does not have widgets integrated with the complex text rendering features. This problem gave birth to the idea of developing...

Most android devices come with set of fonts already installed for all the general purpose use with variety of styles and various languages. There is also something called 'fallback' font which ensures that in case a required font is not available, the system falls back to this font with wide range of characters and more generic style to display the text. But sometimes, you really want to use that specific font which is not there on the device or you just 'have' to use a some non-english font because the system by default does not have the font for the language you wish to use. Though upfront it looks like a simple task of installing the font, unfortunately android does not yet provide a simple way of doing it in user space. It is possible for an application to provide a custom font and use it within the application, but that's not really installing it on the device, its applicable only within the app. Recently while working with some Indic languages on androi...