Recently, I tried viewing a website on my Android device. Some of the content of the website contains text in a specific Indic font. I noticed that the website is not displayed in the Android browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etcetera) as it is displayed on my PC. The intended font (Indic font) is replaced by another font, when viewed in any browser on my Android device.
As I have root access on my Android mobile, I moved the indicfont.ttf
file (which I downloaded from the Internet) to the /system/fonts
folder and restarted my phone. Now, I can view the website perfectly (but only on Firefox browser for Android).
I have the following questions to ask:
- Can someone please explain all the steps involved in the process of displaying the Indic font by Firefox browser (in the particular scenario explained above)? The
indicfont.ttf
was placed in the/system/fonts
directory. - Why does the previous solution only work on Firefox browser and not on other mobile browsers?
Most importantly, could you suggest a possible solution for non-rooted Android phones? It is okay even if it is a difficult solution to implement.
My device: (Android 4.4.4, Firefox 32.0.1)
EDIT: There are many fonts for Sanskrit (Devanāgarī script) among which the following two are the ones in the scenario: Sanskrit2003 and Mangal.
These are some important facts that are derived from a good source about Indic fonts available on this site.
From Android 4.0 on wards, Tamil and other few languages are supported through browser as said in Android 4.x API overview as seen below.
Support for Indic fonts (Devanagari, Bengali, and Tamil, including the complex character support needed for combining glyphs) in WebView and the built-in Browser.
My issue is that the default support given by the browsers display the Sanskrit text in Mangal font and not in Sanskrit2003 font (a superior font compared to Mangal ).
- The whole issue is to let the android mobile browser display Sanskrit (which is intended to be displayed in Sanskrit2003 font) to be displayed in the intended font and not in Mangal (which is very less superior in comparison with Sanskrit2003 ).
Thanks.