Displaying UTF-8 characters in a TextView

Question

Do I have to do anything special to display UTF-8 characters in a TextView?

I'm trying to display the following characters:

זוג, למטרות רומנטיות, מיניות או אחרות, בהתאם להעדפותיהם. אתרי היכרויות מכילים מאגר מידע הכולל פרופיל אישי של מנויים. כל אדם המעוניין להצטרף לשירות, ממלא טופס הרשמה באתר ויוצר לעצמו פרופיל.

If I use Log.d(TAG, text) where text contains the characters I'm going to display, it displays correctly in the logcat output. If I then use textview.setText(text), all that's displayed in the TextView is boxes.

From what I've been reading, a lot of these fonts, like Hebrew and such aren't supported by Android, however, if I send myself an email with these characters, they are displayed correctly in the Gmail and Tiwtter apps.

How can I display these characters correctly?

UPDATE:

I installed the AnySoftKeyboard app, and the Hebrew language pack, and suddenly my app is able to display Hebrew. If I uninstall both of these, my app is still able to display Hebrew. This doesn't make any sense at all to me.

Answer 1

The problem is due to the fonts installed.

If the font being used does not have the Hebrew alphabet you'll see whatever the fon't uses for it's default character (i.e. a box).

As far as I'm aware there isn't a Hebrew font installed by default in all Android distributions, hence why AnySoftKeyboard has a Hebrew language pack that installs a fon't with the Hebrew alphabet.