Daily Archive for August 16th, 2009

Now Malayalam keyboard in Android

Continuing with my Android hacks, I now can input unicode Malayalam on my T Mobile G1 phone !!

Typed using Malayalam layout

Typed using Malayalam layout

I have to say thanks to excellent work done by ‘worry’ at xda-developers forum. It took the whole day to download android sources (my hotel internet connection kept failing to resolv android.git.kernel.org after some time, finally added the ip address to /etc/hosts to solve it), and a while to find the correct keymap file to overwrite.

Update: Malayalam displayed with Suruma and Meera fonts.

text displayed with suruma

text displayed with meera

Step 1: Follow this instructions to download android source code.

Step2: Edit development/emulator/keymaps/qwerty.kcm with the desired layout [ download Malayalam layout here ] [Update: 21/Aug/2009 Some bugs fixed]

Step 3: Compile android sources with ‘make’ command [ download the binary file here ]

Step 4: Take backup of your existing keyboard layout
adb pull /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3_us.kcm.bin out/target/product/generic/system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3_us.kcm.bin

Step 5: Push modified keymap file to the device or emulator
adb push out/target/product/generic/system/usr/keychars/qwerty.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin

When done with typing, push the original keymap back. I know it isn’t pretty, ‘worry’ has an app to do this automatically, I will have to find out how it is done.

Now on to the tougher task, complex rendering support.