How to Enable/View Bengali or Other Unsupported Fonts in Opera Mini

Opera mini is one of the most popular mobile phone browsers that never lost its demand. Specially in low-end phones and slow internet areas, it’s a must have web browser. What makes it different from other browsers is its ability to compress web contents and pages on server-side and deliver smaller sized pages to the user. Thus this saves users a significant amount of bandwidth and loading time without changing the actual view of pages. Amazingly these data savings sometimes reach to more than 90%. It’s probable the only mobile browser that is economic, lightweight and huge data and time savior. The availability for most mobile platforms made it most common mobile browser ever.

The problem is if you are on a phone that has limited font support, Opera Mini may not able to render texts that has fonts which are not present on your phone’s system. In such cases Opera Mini will show box or question marks in the places of those unsupported fonts. This prevents you from reading those texts. This is mostly noticeable for South Asian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, Hindi, etc.

Thankfully Opera Mini has an easy fix with an option for this problem. Here’s how you can display unsupported fonts in Opera Mini on you phone.

Enabling Unsupported/Complex Fonts (e.g. Bengali) in Opera Mini

1. Enter into Opera Mini and type opera:config or only config: in address bar and hit OK from keyboard.
   
2. Scroll down toward bottom and set Yes for the section Use bitmap fonts for complex scripts.
   
3. Hit Save button from bottom and restart Opera Mini.
4. From now you should see Bangla or other complex scripted fonts that are not supported by your phone.

Note: You may need internet connection to configure it and this method works on all Opera Mini versions across all platforms.

How it Works

Since web pages loaded in Opera Mini are passed through Opera’s servers, Opera server will convert those unsupported fonts into bitmap images so that they can be viewed on your phone. This is actually a server-side setting (your Opera Mini is linked to its server with your unique device information and IP). Thus even if none of your browsers can show you unsupported fonts, Opera Mini can help you to read them.