Japanese and Chinese translations are not working

[CvH]

Bug report

Describe the bug

After installing Japanese or Chinese language at Kodi no symbols are shown. This happens at LibreELEC and Windows (with installed and switched languages at Windows).

Expected Behavior

Kodi should show chin/jap translations instead of nothing

Actual Behavior

Showing just blocks instead of fonts.

Possible Fix

install chin/jap enabled fonts via the language addons ?

To Reproduce

install and activate Japanese as kodi interface language

Debuglog

kodi.log

Screenshots

Your Environment

• Android

• iOS

• [ x ] Linux

• OSX

• Raspberri-Pi

• [ x ] Windows

• Windows UWP

• Operating system version/name:

• Kodi version: 18.0-RC4 Git:20181228

[yol]

Yeah, I also noticed that before, I think it's a very valid issue. Thanks for reporting. Workaround for now (if you didn't know already) is to set the font to "Arial based" before changing the language.

@phil65 I think this might be seen as skin-related issue since Estuary ships Noto Sans, can you comment here?

Possible solutions that I see:

• Ship a more complete font with Estuary - easy
• Fall back to the DejaVu Sans we ship for characters not present in the selected (skin) font (also maybe ship Noto Sans instead) - probably too complicated and far-reaching for v18

[yol]

Fall-back font is out for v18, too invasive (looked into it); but I think it's the proper fix for the roadmap

My personal suggestion would be to change our default-shipped font from DejaVu to Noto Sans with CJK support and remove Noto from Estuary

[CvH]

Shipping a catch all font is too big (9mb vs ~350kb) but why don't ship the font with the language addon instead ? Sounds reasonable and easy to maintain AND works for all skins.
Idk what might be the correct approach for K18, maybe removing the languages for now ?

[yol]

Shipping a catch all font is too big (9mb vs ~350kb)

We already ship DejaVu Sans anyway, which is 5 MB and supports CJK as far as I'm aware. Other additional languages that it might not cover (no idea if there are any) would not result in any significant increase. So this point does not really hold.

why don't ship the font with the language addon instead

I don't think we have the infrastructure in place for autoswitching the font on lang install (someone correct me if I'm wrong), so even if we wanted that solution it's too invasive for v18.

[CvH]

and supports CJK as far as I'm aware

I just looked into Noto (while searching an solution for LE) and there is a rather big size difference.
Btw I am not trying to look like someone that has an idea about the font situation ;)

I don't think we have the infrastructure in place

Yes likely there is nothing at K18 - the idea looks rather obvious to ship the needed font with the language addon. Also this would support all skins instead that every skin might need to ship their own one (not sure this is true or not).

[yol]

I just looked into Noto (while searching an solution for LE) and there is a rather big size difference.

Which version did you investigate? Noto supports a lot of languages and quite thoroughly :-) I'm not sure we need that much. As said we could merge Latin characters into DejaVu to keep the current size.

[CvH]

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Serif+SC?selection.family=Noto+Serif+SC

like said I have actually not really an idea about fonts :)

[CvH]

just to add, it is broken since at least K17, several other languages are broken too (maybe i missed some)
amharic, arabic, armenian, burmese, hebrew, hindi, korean, persian , sinhala, tamil, telugu, thai

[CastagnaIT]

same problem using netflix addon, whenever there are titles with languages as arabic or japanese or chinese etc... no symbols are show

example:

please update the skin font is incomprehensible and use arial based makes the screen pretty ugly

[JayXon]

Any update on this? Will font fallback be in v19?

[yol]

No one is currently working on this.