"Ə" character in android

Question

I am writing small application for andriod on Eclipse. The application contains of WebView component and different kind of text on it. Text also contains of different unicode characters like ü,ş,ö,ğ,ə. I replaced all unicode characters with according html code (exmample: ü ə ç). But only "ə" character doens't work correctly in emulator (I didn't check on real device yet). "ü,ş,ç" are working correctly because the are also using more popular Turkish alphabet. Turkish and Azerbaijani are very same, but only the last has "ə" letter. If I will not find any solve of this problem I should be use "Ää" instead of "Əə", they are the same, but the first was used in past times, and new young generation of country doesn't know it. Please give any good idea to solve this problem.

Answer 1

Testing on Android 2.3.5, I was surprised to see that the capital schwa “Ə” is not supported in any of its preinstalled fonts, but small schwa “ə” is. The reason might be that the schwa is used in phonetics (IPA) to indicate a neutral (schwa) vowel, and always in lower case only. So the font coverage takes this into account but is not designed to cover natural languages where the letter is used, in both cases, for whatever purpose a writing system has for it.

There are various workarounds:

1. Use Ä for Ə as you’re considering. Then you should probably use ä instead of ə as well.
2. Use A for Ə (and a for ə). This is common in texts in English when Azeri names are written. Not correct, but common.
3. Use ə in a larger font size to simulate Ə. An ugly hack. Has the risk of messing up line spacing, among other things.
4. Use Ә, i.e. U+04DB Cyrillic capital letter schwa. Oddly enough, this is present in the Android fonts. It generally has the same shape as the Latin schwa; they are coded as distinct characters mainly because they belong to different writing systems. This is a hack, of course, but the objections are theoretical rather than practical. But problems arise if you e.g. process the text in a language-sensitive manner (e.g., spelling checks, automatic translation), since you are in principle using all wrong spelling.
5. Use a web font (downloadable font, embedded font), such as a Google font. It can be difficult to find a suitable font, though (one that contains the character and matches your design stylistically), and you would need to decide whether to use that font throughout or just for the problem character (in the latter case, you would need to wrap its occurrences in span containers in order to style them). A quick study suggests that there is no suitable Google font for the purpose, but I might be wrong.

Answer 2

I have resolved it by this way: 1) I have download font which support Azerbaijani from here: http://fontlar.info/ 2) Then I used this answer to appear custom font for all project How to set custom font for a whole application in Android?

Answer 3

Consider installing a better font, like Gentium!