Android 5.1 ships with support for several minority scripts

Alolita Sharma alolita.sharma at gmail.com
Fri Mar 13 21:53:16 CDT 2015


Roozbeh,

This is great news! Thanks for your efforts in integrating Noto and
Harfbuzz in Android and @unicode too :-)

Is there a link to a blog post or release notes listing the improved
language support?

Best,
Alolita



On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 7:00 PM, Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at unicode.org>
wrote:

> Android 5.1
> <http://officialandroid.blogspot.com/2015/03/android-51-unwrapping-new-lollipop.html>,
> released earlier this week, has added support for 25 minority scripts. The
> wide coverage can be reproduced by almost everybody for free, thanks to the
> Noto <https://code.google.com/p/noto/> and HarfBuzz
> <http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/> projects, both of
> which are open source. (Android itself is open source too.)
>
> By my count, these are the new scripts added in Android 5.1: Balinese,
> Batak, Buginese, Buhid, Cham, Coptic, Glagolitic, Hanunnoo, Javanese, Kayah
> Li, Lepcha, Limbu, Meetei Mayek, Ol Chiki, Oriya, Rejang, Saurashtra,
> Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Tai Tham, Tai Viet, Thaana, and
> Tifinagh.
>
> (Android 5.0, released last year, had already added the Georgian lari,
> complete Unicode 7.0 coverage for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, and seven new
> scripts: Braille, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherokee, Gujarati,
> Gurmukhi, Sinhala, and Yi.)
>
> Note that different Android vendors and carriers may choose to ship more
> fonts or less, but Android One <http://www.android.com/one/> phones and
> most Nexus <http://www.google.com/nexus/> devices will support all the
> above scripts out of the box.
>
> None of this would have been possible without the efforts of Unicode
> volunteers who worked hard to encode the scripts in Unicode. Thanks to the
> efforts of Unicode, Noto, and HarfBuzz, thousands of communities around the
> world would can now read and write their language on smartphones and
> tablets for the first time.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Unicode mailing list
> Unicode at unicode.org
> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20150313/5ee48a2a/attachment.html>


More information about the Unicode mailing list