On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 18:03, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) <
smazeland(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dear all,
As requested at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Mumbai last weekend by
Srikanth, and also in bug 32619[1], *Narayam* was just *enabled* on *Wikimedia
Commons*. I hope you find it useful.
Thank you!! :) It will be put to good use lot of Indic wiki users who are
regular to commons.
During the hackathon we had a lot of help in adding
more key mappings to
Narayam[2], and we are right now at the Red Hat offices in Pune working
together with their localisation team for Indic languages to verify and get
feedback for more Indic languages. The recent work may be deployed next
Monday (28/11), but it could also be delayed a week. The complete Wikimedia
Localisation team is travelling home this weekend, and we haven't reviewed
all the code yet, hence the possible delay.
Am particularly excited on the "*On screen keyboard*"[1] done by Abhijeet
Pathak which will be of great help. Some UI changes / testing may be
needed, but on-screen keyboard will be amazing especially for people who
are new to the typing even phonetically.
Another *exciting feature* we are planning on
deploying and enabling on
many Indic language projects to increase accessibility, and that we would
like to have your feedback[3] on is *WebFonts*[4]. Many languages do not
have proper fonts easily available to users. This may be because the
operating systems do not ship these fonts, the script has fonts but users
don't know from where they will get them from or how to install them in
their system. Another reason is because the user is reading the wiki from a
shared computer without these fonts. Sometimes it may be because the user
does not know how to configure the operating system for a language or the
user does not have enough permissions to do this. Because of all these
reasons, providing the content in certain languages is problematic.
WebFonts sends the fonts with the data and therefore we expect that
everybody can see the text correctly.
Webfonts is great thing in technology and its great that wikimedia wikis
are geared to use it, thanks to the i18n team. I know a lot of font testing
was done at hackathon, but before deploying webfonts, we must ensure that
the selected fonts are usable / bug-free on all the languages. As for
Tamil, until the Lohit-Tamil hinting issue is resolved / better free fonts
emerge out, please do not deploy Webfonts for Tamil wiki projects since it
affects readability to everyone and as decided and agreed there wont be any
preferences. I would suggest all communities which plan to use Webfonts, do
proper font-testing since its very important and iron out all the bugs
before launch for a smooth experience.
[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/11/narayam-will-look-like-this.html
--
Regards
Srikanth.L