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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Enable Devnagari support (partial) on Android Devices

How To Enable Devanagari (Hindi/Marathi) support
on android devices

Below is a method which I compiled from various guides about how to do it, which sums up the various things to do into one, and tested working on my HTC Desire phone.
There is a lot of information on pushing fonts to your device, and how to use ADB on your rooted android phone, but its kind of general, and not specific. To follow these instructions, your phone needs to be rooted. Yes- rooting isn't difficult, and its a job of just a few minutes. Though there must be a rooting procedure available for your phone.
So here we go!

What You Need
1) Your Android Device (Rooted/possible to be rooted)
2) A PC (Windows)
3) Data Cable provided with your phone

Procedure
1) Root your phone: To know more about how to root it, just search google with "root (your_phone_name)", and you'd get the best possible method to do it. Also install a "custom recovery" as specified.
2) Install android SDK on your PC. To do so, you can follow the procedure at the same link. You may have to disable the various "sync" applications with your phone such as HTC Sync.
3) Save the SDK to C:/ drive root with folder name "sdk" (directly on drive, no nested folder and small letters)
4) Download THIS file (DroidSansFallback.zip), unzip it, and you'd get a DroidSansFallback.ttf file out of it. Copy this file to C:/sdk/tools folder of your android SDK.
5) Now you're good to go. Power off your phone, and boot into recovery (using your favorite method, such as hardware key combination etc). Then connect the phone with a data cable to your PC.
6) Open Command Prompt on your PC, and type the following commands one by one EXACTLY as listed here:

cd c:/sdk/tools
adb shell mount /system
abd shell rm /system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf
adb push DroidSansFallback.ttf /system/fonts
adb shell remount
adb shell reboot
adb reboot

That should do the "font pushing" part for you.
Now let your phone reboot. Try opening up any website which shows Devanagari content (such as esakal.com) and see if it worked for you!
If it didn't, try installing MultiLang Keyboard from android market. That will enable you to write in Devanagari also, with some practice, of course!