How does Android handle fonts that don't provide support for a language's characters?

Question

More specifically if the font is missing the glyphs for a languages characters(double byte characters, etc) does Android default to another font or does it just show the SBOD(square box of death) symbol in place of the character?

I'm also curious how people handle font internationalization when using custom fonts.

these are done with the unicode take a look in this link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10497322/insert-unicode-symbols-to-edittext — Ram Mandal, Jul 06 '15 at 17:55
These are done with the unicode take a look in this link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10497322/insert-unicode-symbols-to-edittext — Ram Mandal, Jul 06 '15 at 17:56

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '15 at 16:31

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I am not sure but I guess the app needs to handle it.Many apps place images of the symbol when its not supported by the font.Google recently launched Noto-https://www.google.com/get/noto/ which is supposed to support most of the languages.

answered Jul 06 '15 at 16:31

rupesh jain

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That sounds like a lot of overhead placing images as fonts. I think the best solution will be to hard copy the font file to apk assets dir and test all languages the app supports against it. Thanks for the noto link by the way. Looks like google.com/fonts has a lot of options that may be possible too. – Captain Kirk Jul 06 '15 at 21:52
After some time testing, it looks like Android is smart enough to fall back to a system font if another font doesn't have the glyphs. Regarding language support Noto Sans looks like a great way to go. If you want something fancy language support plummets. Be prepared to pay high font prices for those at places like myfonts.com. $500 for a fancy app licensed font. I'm getting heartburn i'll stick with free. – Captain Kirk Jul 07 '15 at 15:55

How does Android handle fonts that don't provide support for a language's characters?

1 Answers1