Hindi font display through LWUIT

[sreeNarayana]

I created Hindi font resource (Mangal face) through LWUIT.

I have developed a small application which displays Hindi font on two components, Label and Text area. (Both components are LWUIT components)

It displays properly in Text Area but not in Label.
It displays as letters separate and Matras separate, not as combined. (ex: क + । = का ).

Please give suggestions to my problem. Thanks in advance.

[skalogir]

Hi sreeNarayana,

There is a known issue regarding fonts generated by LWUIT's Resource Editor, for Hindi and Arabic characters. At this point, it is not clear whether this is an incompatibility between the Resource Editor and Nokia phones or whether this affects a larger number of devices and vendors. It seems that some characters generated by LWUIT's resource editor are not properly displayed neither on the device's screen nor the emulator. If you try to display the same characters in LWUIT's native Label or TextArea components, those are properly displayed.

On top of that, some other Hindi characters cannot be displayed in a LWUIT Label, or in a LWUIT Text Area (that is without using the Resource Editor). For example, the character प़ is not properly displayed on Nokia's SDK 1.0 for Java Emulator.

I would suggest using LCDUI UI components in your case.

[SmartPhoneEra]

In general, one has to write font rendering engine for these complex scripts. Languages like Hindi has many complexities in terms of rendering matras, conjuncts, glyphs etc. Also some characters have to be rendered as half characters when followed by "halant". I had written my own font engine to take of all these cases when working on canvas based programming. Not sure about LWUIT. Are you able to see characters like क्ष त्र etc?

[sreeNarayana]

hi skalogir,

Thanks for your help and suggestion. I added " Label.setFocusable(true); ". to one component(Label or Text area). In my application Form has more than one label and text area. After executing in emulator, When I change the focus from one component to another component, the highleted or focused component displays properly, other components doesn't display properly.

So problem may not be with either label or text area but some where else in rendering. Please can you give any suggesstion on this?


hi smartPhoneEra,

I didn't write any rendering engine. I can able to display all characters properly. But when I try to write words it is not able to combine letters with matras properly.

[skalogir]

This is not a code issue, that can be fixed with setting a component as focusable. Although setting the label as a focusable component, can fix your problem, this is just a hack, not a solution and the issue still remains that the label should have been able to show your text in the first place (i.e. without being focusable). Using LWUIT/Resource Editor with non-Latin characters can result in a very unpredictable behavior. The combination of this external library with non-Latin characters is known to cause display problems on both the device and the emulator. You can try to use this hack, if that solves your problems, but given that LWUIT is not fully tested with non-Latin input on Nokia Devices, it is unclear what else and when can go wrong in your application. That is why I strongly suggest using the LCDUI components in your case.