Hello,
I know this is probably the wrong mailing list to ask, but I guess that
I still have the highest chance to reach somebody who has something to
do with this problem.
Currently, if you buy a Non-Japanese Android phone, you only get the
standard Android font, which has Chinese mainland style
Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja. This is nice for all those people who are using
Chinese, but not that nice for those people who are using Japanese. Of
course, you can read it (except for 直), but it is really not that
pretty. Well, this is the usual Han unification problem, but on other
devices (PCs for example), it is not that much of a problem because you
can usually select the font, or a Japanese font is displayed by default.
Well, in Android you cannot do it, and if you don’t have the luck to
have a Japanese phone, you will not be able to use the Japanese font
(DroidSansJapanese.ttf). You can only install it by rooting the phone,
which few people want to do. But if you do it, actually that font is
quite nice.
So if somebody from Google reads this, is there maybe some way that the
DroidSansJapanese.ttf will be included in the standard Android system,
/and/ that it can be selected easily in the menu? (Something in the
language screen, where you can select “preferred East Asian script:
Chinese (China), Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), Korean” – well, I don’t
know if there are Korean or Taiwanese fonts available, but if yes, they
would be nice as well). I guess if the font were be included in Android
right from the start, the device manufacturers would not bother to
delete it. Also, it would be necessary that you can select the font also
if you don’t have Japanese language (which is not available on most
western phones either way) - e.g. French system language with Japanese
font.
Additionally, if the standard Android web browser could then use the
html “lang” tag to select the appropriate font, it would be even nicer.
So even if you have Chinese as the selected font, if you then surf on a
Japanese page, the Japanese font will be displayed automatically; and
the other way round with Chinese (if a Japanese font is selected by
default). Firefox can do that on PCs (in contrast to Chrome), so it
would be really nice if Android could do it as well.
I know that this is only a minor problem which 99.99% of the users will
bother with (Japanese users also don’t bother, so it is only for all
those western guys who are speaking Japanese instead of Chinese), but
for the rest of them it is quite some problem, I think. I heard so many
complaints of people I know who are absolutely not satisfied with the
Chinese font. Also, this may not be that much of a problem on
smartphones, but at least on Android tablets I want to have a nice font.
I hope somebody who has something to do with this problem will read this
:) For all the other ones, sorry that I misused this mailing list.
Thanks!
Gerrit
- Japanese font on Non-Japanese Android phones Gerrit
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