Hi,
So, since there are a lot of discussions about typography lately, I guess I
have to chime in with internationalization considerations.
tl;dr:
1. Bug 57045 should be resolved.
2. Typography changes shouldn't be made default in any language without
testing and positive approval.
The long version:
The discussions about typography need to take into account not just the
Latin alphabet, but other alphabets as well. Even within the Latin alphabet
there can be variations; for example, Vietnamese and some other languages
use a very large number of đìâċṛįṭīçś, which may require use of different
styles.
Generally, *any* significant typography changes must be tested in all
scripts and nothing should be enabled by default in any project without a
positive approval from the community or at least from Language Engineering.
This is not as heavy and bureaucratic as it sounds, however :)
What do I mean by "all scripts"? Basically scripts like "Latin",
"Cyrillic", "Devanagari", etc. Their number is much smaller than the
~300
languages of MediaWiki. An easy step to properly creating these groups
would be resolving bug 57045 [1], where I propose grouping languages by
script names.
And here are some actual basic style considerations:
* minimum line-height: usually not important for Latin, but often needed
for languages of South and South-East Asia.
* minimum letter size: languages with complex glyphs and ligatures are
usually completely unreadable under 12, and may even need a size of over
14. Examples are Chinese, and many languages of India.
* underline: underline is quite bad for writing systems where the letters
often go below the baseline, such as Arabic. (This is actually implemented
in a very hacky way in getStyles() in
includes/resourceloader/ResourceLoaderUserCSSPrefsModule.php and should be
refactored.)
* uppercase and small caps: this may be useful and nice for Latin,
Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian, but other writing systems don't have it.
Depending on it for adding elegance or for emphasis is not a good idea.
These are the basics. Obviously, there may be more considerations.
Another relevant link:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Internationalization/Styling_and_typography
[1]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57045
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore