[RNLD] Making unicode fonts work on android phones

[Andrew Cunningham]

Stephen,

1) As indicated you can set the Tai Ahom font as default Unicode font for
Firefox, at the moment I am working on a greasemonkey script for Cham and
tai Viet scripts that i hope will be extensible and giver finer control

For Chrome, there is an extension that can be installed called Advanced
Font Settings, which allows you to set a default font per script or Unicode
block, this should be suitable for teh Tai Ahom font

2) Android is much more complicated, there are a number of multilingual
keyboard packages available, and some developers are willing to add new
languages, if you wnat to follow this path i can put you in touch with
someone.

An alternative is to use Keyman Touch on Android, if you want to go down
this path i can create the layout for you.

The third approach is to create a custom langauge specific keyboard layout.
I have a colleague in Cambodia who has done this for Khmer and Cham, and I
can follow up on that.

Fonts are the most problematic part fo the exercise. First you need a
version of Android that supports the correct rendering of Tai Ahom, if
there are rendering issues. Assuming you have aversion of Android taht can
render Tai Ahom, you will need to root the phone and install the font, not
a procedure I would recommend for the average user.

Some Samsung Galaxy models and other phones allow you to change the default
display font, and there are apps like SP Fontomizer and iFont that assist
in installing the font on such phones.

Alternatively it is possible to construct a font addon to install a font
inside Firefox for Android, This will allow the font to be used as a
fallback font for Android even if you can't use it anywhere else on the
system. At the moment I am refactoring my font addons for Firefox for
Android

The final alternative is to limit input and display to a particular app and
then cut and past between other apps, although in this final approach you
can only see the text in your app and not other apps.

Andrew




On 6 August 2014 15:14, Stephen Morey <S.Morey at latrobe.edu.au> wrote:

>  Dear RNLD members,
>
> I have recently made a Tai Ahom Unicode font (with the help of Martin
> Hosken of SIL) and Last week uploaded it for use by community members in
> India on facebook and in emails.
>
> Several questions have come up which I can't answer subsequent to this.
>
> 1) Some people can get the font to work in Mozilla (by making the Ahom
> Unicode font the default font) but not on Chrome, which it seems people in
> India use. Does anyone know how to get it to work on Chrome
>
> 2) People are asking me how to get the font to work on an android phone,
> which many people there use but I do not yet. Does anyone know how to
> install a font into an Android font, as well as a keyboard, so that it can
> be used? The keyboard I have made is done with the Microsoft Keyboard
> Layout Creator and is a microsoft type keyboard.
>
> Stephen
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Project Manager, Research and Development
(Social and Digital Inclusion)
Public Libraries and Community Engagement
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia

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Mobile: 0459 806 589
Email: acunningham at slv.vic.gov.au
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