How to Display Characters of Any Regional Languages on your Android Smart Phone?

As I mentioned in my previous article, Arial Unicode MS is one of the way to display texts written in various languages such as Hindi, Nepali, Bengali, Tamil, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other Asian and Indic Languages. While you can use any of the fonts that support your language in place of Arial Unicode MS used in this article, Arial Unicode MS is preferred for its support of vast languages as it supports nearly 50,000 characters from different languages.

In this article, I will share the technique that will allow you to render most of the Asian Languages fonts in your android devices. It will help you solve the problem of showing square brackets instead of the characters of your font. You need to have a rooted smart phone since we are going to change system settings so please make sure your phone is rooted. If you need to root your phone please read how to root your android smart phone article. Please follow the steps given below carefully:

1. Download Arial Unicode MS.ttf font file from this page.

2. Now in your phone, using root explorer, go to /system/fonts/ and find DroidSansFallback.ttf font.

3. Backup this font for you might need it in the future. You can simply copy it to your sd card or to your computer.

4. Rename the Arial Unicode MS.ttf file you downloaded earlier to DroidSansFallback.ttf (Name is case sensitive, so write as it is written here.) and copy it to your sd card.

5. Use root explorer to copy this file to /system/fonts/ and replace the original DroidSansFallback.ttf font.

6. Now it’s testing time. Open any of your browsers and visit any website that contains fonts that you were previously unable to see or render. Yes, you noticed that right, notice the square brackets you used to see previously are shown in characters that you can understand or read. Doesn’t it work great?

That’s all. You can now view emails, websites and texts written in your own language or any fonts within your android smart phone. If by chance, you couldn’t get the desired output in step 6, please consider rebooting your device and try step 6 again. Also, I found that some rendering of Nepali text (especially of grammatical symbols) is not shown correctly in my Samsung Galaxy Pop/Mini gts5570 smart phone, but that is all we get and I think you can manage with that (You can reference the quotation 'Something is better than nothing' in this regard). Also, if you really want to get exact rendering you might try searching for other Unicode fonts for your Language.