Compiling ICU4C for Unity Android

[Lucas García Mateu]

Greetings,

For context I will explain the full extent to our intents with the ICU4C library, since there may be a better way to approach it overall.

We use Unity UI for building digital product for the Middle East. Unfortunatelly, the TextMeshPro text component doesn't feature support for RTL, so for Arabic we have built a modified version of the component which uses ICU4C for setting the text flow using the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm.

Since Unity doesn't support C++ directly, this is achieved through a C++ wrapper which uses the binaries distributed by ICU, compiled to a native-plugin which is used by Unity through the Mono interop feature.

This approach works well in Windows, but of course not in Android. For following the same path we would have to build an Android native-plugin. Building the wrapper seems easy enough, Visual Studio features a template for Dynamic Shared Library (Android) and I could also read into the documentation of the Android NDK. However, I would also need the binaries for the ICU4C library, and that's what I need help with.

So far, since I don't find them among the released binaries, I've tried to compile them myself. After downloading the source code and compiling it for Windows I can't get around changing the configuration of the Visual Studio project to compile for Android. I have also tried CMake, but copy pasting AI scripts hasn't been of any use either.

How can I get the ".so" binaries compatible for Android I need? Is it possible to compile ICU4C to Android binaries without modifying the source code? If not, is there another feasable approach?

Thanks

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