Malayalam wikipedia displayed with Meera font on Android
This post by Kaippally inspired me to start working on Malayalam support on Android phones. I was a bit hesitant to jailbreak my T Mobile G1 phone because EFF advised me that this could be used against me in court, if if goes to that (See my petition to Free Your Phone). But after seeing the above post I wanted to have a stab at getting Malayalam support. When Nishan came to my house last Saturday, we sat down and followed instructions to jailbreak G1 and got root access.
Since Android does not have a font picker, we over wrote DroidSans.ttf in /system/fonts with Meera_04.ttf. Though at first it was showing Chinese characters, a reboot displayed Malayalam wikipedia, though without complex rendering support (ie, no conjuncts). Now I can read Malayalam websites, emails and other text in my G1 phone.
I know this is not perfect, but this is most important step in bringing the complete Malayalam support to android. Next steps are
* Get Malayalm keyboard layout working
* Add support for complex rendering
* Translate the user interface
If you are excited to see Malayalam support on Android and want to help out, get in touch with us at smc.org.in
Dear Praveen
This is possible even with almost all Nokia and Blackberry phones. Complex rendering is where the cake is.
anyway keep trying.
cheers
Yes, that is the major task. Meanwhile I made typing unicode Malayalam working.
Congratulations Praveen. That in itself is a major achievement.
Glad to see mallus working in android, Keep it up
Hi Praveen,
Any improvement in the complex rendering support for malayalam in Android? I could able to render malayalam font in 2.1 , but no conjucts.
~ Suresh
Hi All,
I just got myself a HTC Droid Incredible running Droid 2.1. Its been a week since i started using it and i have been an iphone user for a while. It seems that atlast they have an iPhone killer and lets hope the marketing and PR will do their job to push the message out..
Anyways please let me know if you make this work so i could start reading malayalam newpapers on my phone.
Cheers
Paul