beta features - RTL icons - Design

29 Nov 2013

Hi,

Beta features have icons to represent them at Special:Preferences.

They usually show a schematic representation of a MediaWiki page with a
logo in the top left corner, and this of course means that they should be
flipped for RTL languages.

Some of them are trivial - just a horizontal flip.

Some of them are less trivial - for example, in the one for the
VisualEditor formula editing I flipped the image and then flipped the Sigma
icon inside it so it would still look like Σ and not flipped.

Some of them are even less trivial, for example the icons for the font
style experiments. It shows the Latin letter A, and it's weird to show a
Latin letter in the beginning of a right-to-left text. Luckily, there are
only two major right-to-left scripts, so I made one icon for Hebrew and one
for Arabic (my sincerest apologies to speakers of Divehi and Syriac).

Some relevant sample commits:
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94379/
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94269/
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94423/
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/98159/

In any case, I'd like to request that the designers who make these icons
would do it from the start. My Inkscape skills miraculously worked for this
till now and there were almost no complaints about my work. Still, when it
comes to graphics software I am not even an amateur, and this should
probably be done by professionals. More importantly, a real designer would
do it with a consideration for RTL from the start.

As always, if you have any questions about internationalizing and bidifying
these icons or any others, please ask Language engineering at the
mediawiki-i18n mailing list or the IRC channel of the same name.

Thanks!

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬