On simulator you just use any font installed on your computer supporting non-english characters. On Android or on iPhone you just put font file inside folder with main.lua
http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2013/01/16/faq-wednesday-custom-fonts/
If I have a string, str, mixed with English & non-English words,
and when I call
display.newText(str, …, “Helvetica”, 16)
the English characters will be in “Helvetica”? and how about the non-English characters?
Helvetica should support a considerable range of UTF-8 glyphs covering many languages. I ran into an issue with Hindi and had to find a font that had Hindi support.
I am using Chinese so I think most fonts don’t support it because of the huge number of characters.
Therefore, when I call
display.newText(str, …, “Helvetica”, 16) or display.newText(str, … ,“Arial”, 16)
both shows the Chinese characters, but I am wondering which font is actually used?
And my second question is, does native.systemFont() support all kinds of language? (for both iPhone & Android)
When I call native.systemFont() for iPhone & Android, the font is decided & rendered by the device, not Corona, right?
If you say “Helvetica”, it’s going to use Helvetica. If you say “Arial”, it’s going to use Arial. If that font doesn’t exist, it falls back to native.systemFont.
On iOS 6 and earlier, native.systemFont is Helvetica. On Android, its Droid Sans. On the Kindle Fire and maybe the Nook, it’s Arial. Corona won’t switch font’s mid-string. If it doesn’t know a glyph, it just won’t display it or display a block.