Hello, I have Krypton installed with default skin. when I view a movie like this link
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/504184-...uage=en-US (Please look at the Original Title section for the Original Language) it shows as rectangles. is there no solution to this ? TIA
This usually results from the font used in a skin not having a glyph set (letters / characters) for that language. E.g. If a skin uses font X (say Courier) and font X only has western glyphs (A-Z, a-z, 0-9), the operating system will render any other glyphs (அ ஆ இ ஈ) with that box instead of what's expected because the OS doesn't have an image associated with that glyph.
Fonts designers don't always create all the glyphs for eastern languages because they may not have had the skills (don't know the language) or didn't get paid to develop them. You'll need to (1) pick a skin that uses a universal character set font or (2) change the font in the 'skin settings' if possible. IIRC, changing the font to Arial or MC360 allows most language glyphs to be displayed in Kodi including Tamil.
(2019-02-07, 22:05)ubuntu-xbmc Wrote: [ -> ]This usually results from the font used in a skin not having a glyph set (letters / characters) for that language. E.g. If a skin uses font X (say Courier) and font X only has western glyphs (A-Z, a-z, 0-9), the operating system will render any other glyphs (அ ஆ இ ஈ) with that box instead of what's expected because the OS doesn't have an image associated with that glyph.
Fonts designers don't always create all the glyphs for eastern languages because they may not have had the skills (don't know the language) or didn't get paid to develop them. You'll need to (1) pick a skin that uses a universal character set font or (2) change the font in the 'skin settings' if possible. IIRC, changing the font to Arial or MC360 allows most language glyphs to be displayed in Kodi including Tamil.
I did try the Arial font but still not working though. its just a bummer that a language that old could not be rendered in Kodi out of the box. do you have any clear steps to make it work if it works for you? Right now I have "Arial based" font selected in Estuary skin and it does not render tamil fonts.
I have Chinese, Russian, and Arabic working with Arial and thought (from a quick search of Google) that Tamil was in Arial as well. But I created a fake Tamil music album on my system and the Tamil didn't display correctly for me either and it
appears Tamil is not supported in Arial. That puts you in a harder spot. But there are 3 options to fix this:
First, I know the Mimic skin supports more fonts (including Google Catamaran that has Tamil) than just it's default and Arial and I think it supports a ton of languages. But Mimic isn't 100% on Leia. You can check in their
skin support forum to see what you have to do to install it currently (it looks like it needs a few text xml edits).
The second option is to replace Arial with a Tamil supported font. Scot967
posted instructions to do so on Krypton but I don't think this is 100% the same with Leia. The crux is still the same find and replace arial.ttf with Catamaran-Regular.ttf in the Estuary or shared user directory for fonts. You can download
Google Caramaran Regular online without an issue. But the location of arial.ttf doesn't seems consistent over platforms and builds as best I can tell on Leia, so if it's not where it's expected you might need to be careful about replacing it on your system (e.g. it might be shared).
Third, you could try to mod Estuary just slightly to allow a different font to be used.
Here's some instructions for that.
But I haven't tried any of these before.
Thank you, I was able to download Catamaran and install it. seems to render Tamil fonts now. I think the trick is to find the right font. I tried Nirmala (inbuilt font in Windows 10?), Latha. while Latha worked it did not render the english characters. Finally once I copied Catamaran in the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Kodi\addons\skin.estuary\fonts and updating the C:\Program Files (x86)\Kodi\addons\skin.estuary\xml\Font.xml to replace every ttf reference to Catamaran I was able to render Tamil characters and English now! I did see now the Korean names are not rendering when using Catamaran! lol
so I think using the right font matters and no one font seems to have solution for all languages. not sure if there is a perfect solution for everyone out of the box.
Excellent. Good to hear you got it working.
IIRC, the Kodi team identified a way of including at least 1 font for "every" language automatically but doing so drove the size of the Kodi download up by over a gigabyte which creates problems for users who are installing on small appliances. So, I guess this area is still a work in progress.
Maybe there should be a multi-selectable option for selecting language packages during initial setup process. That might address this issue.