[tlug] Japanese fonts under Android

[Jim Breen <jimbreen@example.com>]

I recall the issue of non-Japanese Android devices displaying
only Chinese-style characters was aired here some time ago.
It seems initially they were shipped with a single system font
file, which had Japanese-style characters for the Japanese
market and Chinese-style ones everywhere else. The issue was
flagged with Android as a problem two years ago:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=19660

The only change that has been made, starting with 4.0, is to
let you see Japanese properly if you change the system locale
to Japanese, i.e. you get everything - menus, error messages,
the lot in Japanese. There seems to be no application-level
locale setting.

Needless to say this has been a total turn-off students of
Japanese wanting to use various apps on Android. Apple
and Microsoft got it right from the beginning, so you really have
to wonder why Google can't do it properly.

Any thoughts of how to escalate the issue? I think it calls
for the generation of some bad publicity, much as I hate to
bash a system that's really an application-specific version of
Linux.

Cheers

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen
Adjunct Snr Research Fellow, Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University