[aliceingame]

Hi, I really do like Kodi, but I just found something that I would call a big problem.

I use Kodi in French but I also have content in foreign languages that use unicode characters (like Japanese and Korean song). The Japanese and Korean characters are not showing up in my Kodi...

At first I thought the problem was with unicode or the way the info are saved in my music files, so I searched in the forum and found some hint about what the problem could be... the used font is not unicode.
Then, I decided to turn Kodi in Japanese... to find out that absolutely nothing is showing.... I also tried Re-touched skin, that is installed by default, and I can see Japanese text, including in my songs, but in some places in the menu I can only see squares.

What should we understand if the default skin for Kodi does not support unicode? What is the message that it give to users, especially foreign language users ?


Example of post I found
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=207630
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=69582
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=69962
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=206010

Edit : I tested ALL the available skins and only one is kind of partially able to display unicode text....

[ronie]

What should we understand if the default skin for Kodi does not support unicode? What is the message that it give to users, especially foreign language users ?

it tells them the most important mesage there is to tell about open source:
stand up, get your hands dirty and make it happen.

[aliceingame]

What should we understand if the default skin for Kodi does not support unicode? What is the message that it give to users, especially foreign language users ?

it tells them the most important mesage there is to tell about open source:
stand up, get your hands dirty and make it happen.

Yes, but it can feel like "as an English based community, we do not care about foreign languages". I know it is not true, but it kind of feel this way.

So, If I want to get dirty, is there a place where there is info about how to modify a skin ?

[aliceingame]

The solution is EXTREMELY simple... in the options, change the font to be based on Arial...

Still. when you change the interface in a unicode based language, it should at least ask if you want to switch to arial so you can see the text in the interface.

[scott967]

I believe there is a concern that a font with complete (or at least very large) coverage of unicode codepoints is very large and loading the font may be a challenge for certain devices. So the default font has limited coverage (mostly Latin1 I guess) with the option to load or install optional fonts. The Confluence skin shipped with Kodi does offer a fontset "Arial" with pretty good codepoint coverage (33971 glyphs from the basic multilingual plane).

If you look at the wiki / Kodi skinning manual, it shows the format of the file "font.xml". Basic idea is just to copy an entire

Code:

<fontset></fontset>

section, give it your new name (to see in the settings menu) and find/replace the name of the font in each entry with your new one. You can probably omit the "idloc" unless you want to create a label with translation variants.

You might need to experiment with your font metrics to make sure the look and feel matches the skin. Also if you distribute your font keep in mind the licensing requirements.

scott s.
.

[aliceingame]

I believe there is a concern that a font with complete (or at least very large) coverage of unicode codepoints is very large and loading the font may be a challenge for certain devices. So the default font has limited coverage (mostly Latin1 I guess) with the option to load or install optional fonts. The Confluence skin shipped with Kodi does offer a fontset "Arial" with pretty good codepoint coverage (33971 glyphs from the basic multilingual plane).

If you look at the wiki / Kodi skinning manual, it shows the format of the file "font.xml". Basic idea is just to copy an entire

Code:

<fontset></fontset>

section, give it your new name (to see in the settings menu) and find/replace the name of the font in each entry with your new one. You can probably omit the "idloc" unless you want to create a label with translation variants.

You might need to experiment with your font metrics to make sure the look and feel matches the skin. Also if you distribute your font keep in mind the licensing requirements.

scott s.
.

Thanks Scott for the reply. Yes, confluence have the option to use Arial, but It should ask the user when he change his system language if he want to switch to Arial if he is trying to switch to a language that is not covered by the default font.