Help Evo Japanese Language problem

[YamatoBlue]

Hey guys, I'm new here.

I am having a language problem with my HTC Evo 4g. I use it here in the US, which is where I bought it. I thought I would have no problem viewing Japanese websites and inputting Japanese characters but I was wrong.

The problem I am running into is that quite a few of the Japanese characters I write and websites I view that have certain Japanese characters, these characters appear as their Chinese variants, but not their Japanese variants.

This may not be a big deal for some people, but for me it is a bit confusing when the character for "error" 誤 looks totally different in Chinese. I couldn't even recognize the character at first. Same thing with some Japanese characters that I was viewing on a Japanese website, they didn't appear in Japanese but rather in their Chinese variant.

This may not seem like a big problem to many, but as I use Japanese every day on my phone it is really important for me to have the Japanese font appear properly. What's ironic about all this, the Android phones in Japan have beautiful Japanese fonts and every character appears as its Japanese variant.

I have already downloaded Simeji and openWnn and I talked to the developer of Simeji. I told her that some of the characters are turning up as their Chinese variants and she told me there's nothing she can do and it has to do with the Android font that is preinstalled on the phone. It is becoming rather bothersome for me to type in Japanese or view characters in their Chinese variants and I am really bothered by this. I had the iphone a few years ago and I did not have any problems like this. The Japanese variants of characters always appeared on websites I was browsing and Japanese input on the iPhone showed the characters in their Japanese variant only.

Has anyone had a similar problem here? Does anyone know if anyone at Android is working to fix localization problems?

I don't like the new iPhone and I am not particularly fond of the iPhone/Apple in general, but this is where Apple is winning over the Android OS. Is there a solution to this problem at all?

I don't want to root my phone or do anything drastic like that. I just want to have Japanese show up as Japanese and when I type in Japanese the characters appear properly. Will this be fixed in the next OS version?

 

[Hobashira]

You are right. I have the same problem. I am afraid that I do not come with a solution, though, but If I find one, I will come back to you.

 

[EarlyMon]

Unfortunately - this is a problem because of Android's youth and some issues for developers to easily understand the localization requirements.

The problem of displaying properly comes from the built-in font distributed with our phones trying to implement Chinese-Japanese-Korean all together. Whenever it sees a Unicode font encoding for any of these three languages, it always defaults to displaying Chinese.

The Droid font family - developed by Ascender Corporation

A part of this is not only education on our side for the language, but also for having the right tools. Developers like to use the free fonts - this is common practice with Linux guys (Android is Linux) but this shows some obstacles -

japanese_fonts_01

The font area on the phone is basically locked because US carriers insist on locked handsets.

So, this is why to get the full solution, it seems that the phone must be rooted in order to unlock the area to change out the font with a suitable package.

It's not the answer desired for Hobashira-san or YamatoBlue-san, but it appears to be the correct answer.

竜太郞 である

 

[Hobashira]

Thank you for the above information.
恐れ入ります。

 

[EarlyMon]

Probably I spelled desu wrong (again!)? ^///^

Anyway - just signing with my honored name given by my friends from Waseda many years ago because my other name is a tongue twister.