Hoi,
You can use an existing freely licensed font as a base and only change the characters that need to differ. This is a better approach as it allows for the use of the font in other circumstances as well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On 29 January 2016 at 13:47, Bojan Jankuloski <bojan.jankuloski@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello.

Thanks for looking into the matter. We will now contact the leading font designer in Macedonia, and will consult him about a free font that is suitable visually, i.e.that does not look that different from the present italics.

By the way, can we make only the italics use this font, or is it a technical necessity that it must affect all text on the wiki?

Thanks a lot again
Bojan

On 29 January 2016 at 08:05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
The obvious solution is in using fonts that work properly for a language as it is possible to use a font based on the language code used for a text (standard MediaWiki functionality).

It is therefore only a matter of using the right font and almost everything will be good. 

The obvious question is, is there a freely licensed font that can be used.
Thanks,
      GerardM

On 28 January 2016 at 18:32, Bojan Jankuloski <bojan.jankuloski@gmail.com> wrote:
I writing to you by recoomendation of Andre Klapper about the issue, and he said that I should ask The Language Engineering team about the issue I wrote about. 

I am writing as a bureaucrat of mk.wiki on the suggestion of other active editors and admins who feel that there is one issue that needs addressing on our wiki. 
Namely, that is the italics, whenever we use them. Unicode automatically shows the East Slavic italics, where several letters are different than in our own (and Serbian) alphabet. See the heading Differences from other Cyrillic alphabets in the Serbian alphabet article (the image to the right shows the differences.. The correct ones for Macedonian and Serbian are i in the rightmost, yellow column). Same applies to Macedonian, i.e. it is the same letters that are different. In the text further near the end of the section, it mentions OpenType and things I don't udnerstand.

Our question, as a wiki-community is: is it possible to have something done on our wiki (something to be installed) or elsewhere, so that we will get the proper letters? I know that some free fonts support this, but I am not sure which. I am sure the Serbians will also be interested to implement this on their wiki (although their case is somewhat more complicated by the fact they use dual script on all pages).

We, as a community, use different operating systems and browsers, but everyone sees the Russian-Bulgarian italics, not the Macedonian/Serbian ones. 

Below I have a screenshot of a test I just made for each of the letters. Here is again the table of differences. The ones we want are in the rightmost (yellow) column. We are asking if it is possible for all italics to be displayed this way on the wiki. This will need some special intervention (I assume) as currently we don't have them, but the Russo-Bulgarian in stead. (See screenshot below)

This applies to every OS and browser, because it is a standard by Unicode that hasn't been modified yet to introduce our letters, and so it is, by definition, impossible for us to get Maced./Serb. italics without tweaks in the wiki. Our question is: are those tweaks possible, so our italics will look like that in the yellow column.

I hope there may be a solution for our community.

Thank you very much,



--


Бојан Јанкулоски I Bojan Jankuloski

Главен програмски раководител I Chief Program Manager
Споделено знаење I Shared Knowlege
тел. | tel. +38978 282 698


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_______________________________________________
Mediawiki-i18n mailing list
Mediawiki-i18n@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n




--


Бојан Јанкулоски I Bojan Jankuloski

Главен програмски раководител I Chief Program Manager
Споделено знаење I Shared Knowlege
тел. | tel. +38978 282 698


_______________________________________________
Mediawiki-i18n mailing list
Mediawiki-i18n@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n