Usually browsers for mobile phones support only English language.I have tried to read
online articles, tweets, news etc in Malayalam on different mobile phones. Most of the times only squares will be
visible due to no font available. Even if fonts are available, the
rendering will not be proper.
While searching in Google I found a technique in which we can enable a feature in Opera Mini browser
which is available even for low end mobile phones with java/J2ME/MIDP
support. This will work for almost all language which has unicode
character maps available. eg:- Indian languages Malayalam, Hindi,
Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali etc.
 |
| Opera Mini - Yahoo Malayalam page before changing the setting |
Inorder to read, we have to enable a special menu on the Opera Mini
browser by typing "
about:config" in the address bar of Opera Mini and
click "
Go".
 |
| Opera Mini - Address to open configuration page |
This will open a configuration menu as shown in the screen shot below.In this menu there will be an entry called "
Use
bitmap fonts for complex scripts". By default this setting will be
disabled. Now change the setting to
Yes and click
Save.
 |
| Opera Mini congifig Initial Page |
Scroll down to find the option "Use bitmap fonts for complex scripts"
 |
| Change setting to Yes |
 |
| Click Save button to save the settings |
What exactly happens ?
Usually while processing a web page for mobile phones in opera mini
servers, text will be sent as normal text and font information. So the
actual rendering of the font happens in the mobile. This method causes comparatively less bandwidth. After the change in the setting, Opera
Mini server will render the text at server itself, then convert it to
bitmap images and then send to phone. So the phone will display correct
text.
 |
| Opera Mini - Yahoo Malayalam page after setting |
This method works for other languages other than Malayalam also.So have
good time reading an article in your local language using mobile while
you are on move.
Note: Enabling this option will result in higher data rate. For
example, yahoo malayalam site size is 91KB with setting and it was only
28KB before enabling the setting.
If you are upgrading Opera mini to a higher version, then this setting has to be done again
Button below
