CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidlocalizationlocale
user316117
user316117

Reputation: 8281

RTL language packs for Android? (Hebrew for starters)

I have an industrial control application that runs on phone-format Android devices in Android 2.36 that we ship with our factory equipment. Most of our current customers are in the US, Canada and Europe and the app has been translated into some common European languages.

We now have requests for our products from the Middle East, Israel at the moment, but that's probably just the start.

None of the RTL languages in question - Hebrew, Arabic, etc are shown as options under "Set Locale" in the Setup screen on the device.

Are there language packs from Google that contain the appropriate glyphs and alter the behavior of Views, e.g. for displaying and editing text Right-To-left, and provide a soft keyboard, that I can install so I'll see these languages in Setup's "Set Locale"? Does Google have any programming guidelines for writing apps for a RTL application?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 135

Answers (1)

Gabe Sechan
Gabe Sechan

Reputation: 93658

There's a problem with RTL on pre-3.0 devices. Basically RTL wasn't supported on Android until then. There was a kernel patch to fix it, but it wasn't rolled into the mainline android image, it was only shipped on devices going to that area. It was a pain int he ass to me personally- I wrote keyboard software at the time, it meant I needed to find a device with that patch on it whenever I needed to test an rtl bug. Worse, there's no way to tell if its installed or not, so you can't just do a hack on other devices.

So while it is possible to install new languages on an Android device, it isn't possible to get RTL languages to work on a device that doesn't have special code in Android on pre-3.0 devices. I think you're stuck unless you can either patch the OS image of the devices or you can update to 4.0.

Upvotes: 1

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