[Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] chilifourloko:
hello all,

as all of you may or may not know, android has a separate font for han characters and japanese glyphs when the language is set to japanese; it uses a separate fallback_fonts.xml file called fallback_fonts-ja.xml

on my old phone, simply copying the contents of the ja file over to the normal fallback_fonts.xml file would enable the alternative han character font on any language, it won't be restricted to japanese

except on the galaxy s4, there is no japanese language option; consequently there's no fallback_fonts-ja.xml either so i have nothing to copy over

my only option is to edit the fallback_fonts.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
Fallback Fonts

This file specifies the fonts, and the priority order, that will be searched for any
glyphs not handled by the default fonts specified in /system/etc/system_fonts.xml.
Each entry consists of a family tag and a list of files (file names) which support that
family. The fonts for each family are listed in the order of the styles that they
handle (the order is: regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic). The order in which the
families are listed in this file represents the order in which these fallback fonts
will be searched for glyphs that are not supported by the default system fonts (which are
found in /system/etc/system_fonts.xml).

Note that there is not nameset for fallback fonts, unlike the fonts specified in
system_fonts.xml. The ability to support specific names in fallback fonts may be supported
in the future. For now, the lack of files entries here is an indicator to the system that
these are fallback fonts, instead of default named system fonts.

There is another optional file in /vendor/etc/fallback_fonts.xml. That file can be used to
provide references to other font families that should be used in addition to the default
fallback fonts. That file can also specify the order in which the fallback fonts should be
searched, to ensure that a vendor-provided font will be used before another fallback font
which happens to handle the same glyph.

Han languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) share a common range of unicode characters;
their ordering in the fallback or vendor files gives priority to the first in the list.
Language-specific ordering can be configured by adding a BCP 47-style "lang" attribute to
a "file" element; fonts matching the language of text being drawn will be prioritised over
all others.
-->
<familyset>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>GS45_Arab_AndroidOS.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>DroidSansEthiopic-Regular.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>DroidSansHebrew-Regular.ttf</file>
<file>DroidSansHebrew-Bold.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungThai.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>DroidSansArmenian.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>DroidSansGeorgian.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungBengali.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungDevanagari.ttf</file>

</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungGujarathi.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungKannada.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungMalayalam.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungOriya.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungPunjabi.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungSinhala.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungTamil.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungTelugu.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>AndroidEmoji.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>DroidSans_Subset.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>DroidSansFallback.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file>SamsungKorean.ttf</file>
<file>SamsungKorean-Bold.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<family>
<fileset>
<file lang="jp">MTLmr3m.ttf</file>
</fileset>
</family>
<!-- Note: complex scripts (i.e. those requiring shaping in Harfbuzz) have
a cumulative limit of 64k glyphs. Thus, if they are placed after the
large fonts such as DroidSansFallback, they are likely to render
incorrectly. Please use caution when putting fonts toward the end of
the list.
-->
</familyset>

the alternative han character font file is MTLmr3m.ttf, changing the <file lang="jp"> bit to <file lang="en"> was the closest i got to my desired outcome without breaking other fonts, but it still doesn't change everything

once again, what i want is for all han characters and japanese glyphs to use the MTLmr3m.ttf font for any language i pick instead of using the normal font, but without breaking any other text

i've no idea how to edit this file otherwise so i'm hoping there'll be more experienced people on this forum to help me through this

pls help (´・ω・`)