how to add language support to android

Question

hello i hope someone put me on the right direction with my problem

i want to work on supporting my language, specially the writing on android

we use Arabic characters with little modification ( like parsi, urdu etc)..

i was hoping android has fully supported Arabic , then i would make changes to work with my language. but even 2.2 dosn't support Arabic . it just show Arabic characters and it is not connected. that is "عربية " is displayed "ع ر ب ي ة".

some individuals have made Arabic support on CyanogenMod ROM's for some HTC phones, but they would not tell how they made it. I'v got the android source code, i want to know where to start, where to make changes , what is the library that handle fonts , shaping engine etc ..

ps : android.com and other android related google groups are blocked in my country.

Answer 1

If the problem is only about the font you can change the fonts of text you are using by adding the font file to /assets directory and use it on textViews and etc by adding

Typeface font = Typeface.createFromAsset(getAssets(), "yourFont.ttf");
TextView text=new TextView("Text","this");
text.setTypeface(font);

But I am not sure that all the problem is about finding the right font.( I don't know if the languages you are talking about uses letters which combine with each other like Chinese, it would be harder to manage something like that though) But I believe you may find or create a better font which has less space around the letters so that the letters would look closer. Good luck.

Answer 2

hello, thanks for your answer, after digging alot, i'v found that it involves a lot of changinges in framework/base/core files .

Answer 3

Anymemo is an open-source Android application that has support for Arabic. You can easily check it out with git and take a look at how they solved it.