[QUESTION] How to get SKTypeface.FromFamilyName to return a font for Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Android + iOS, Xamarin.Forms)

[Sebastian1989101]

I'm using a library that uses SKTypeface.FromFamilyName internally to render font on the screen. However, as I found out if the text to display is japanese, korean or chinese, it just prints squares. I tried to add a custom font to my project but I was not able to make SKTypeface.FromFamilyName return anything but NULL with custom fonts. As I have no access to change SKTypeface.FromFamilyName to something else ( at least as far as I know because it's in a private method of a static class - https://github.com/Mapsui/Mapsui/blob/5008d3ab8b0453c27cb487fe6ad3fac87435abbe/Mapsui.Rendering.Skia/LabelRenderer.cs#L277 ), is there any way I can make it return any font for each language (or one per language) that works with these?

[Sebastian1989101]

Alright, found a workaround how I could make it work for Android and iOS.

In case someone else gets in the same position, this worked for me:

string fontFamily;
switch (Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.ToLower())
{
    case "ja":
        fontFamily = SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('あ').FamilyName;
        break;

    case "ko":
        fontFamily = SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('매').FamilyName;
        break;

    case "zh":
        fontFamily = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.IetfLanguageTag.ToLower() switch
            {
                "zh-cn" => SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('实').FamilyName,
                "zh-tw" => SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('實').FamilyName,
                _ => null
            };
        break;

    default:
        fontFamily = null;
        break;
}

[HinTak]

Hmm, can you explicitly name a system font family known to be available on the corresponding platform? E.g. "Noto Sans CJK"?