Forwarding to mobile-l for those not on mediawiki-l with an interest in this problem space.

-Adam

Forwarded conversation
Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Where are the Web fonts loaded?
------------------------

From: Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson@kiwix.org>
Date: Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 1:56 AM
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Hi

A few Wikipedias - like the Wikipedia in Farsi - (should) have support
for Web fonts. This is done to insure that the display of the article is
done correctly. Unfortunately I have difficulties to find them, where
are they defined/loaded?

Kind regards
Emmanuel

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----------
From: Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il>
Date: Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 2:21 AM
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


They can be enabled by clicking the gear icon near the Languages list, then
clicking "Fonts", and checking "Download fonts when needed".

This was on by default for some time in 2013, but it turned out to cause
severe performance problems and was made opt-in.

By 2017 the issues are quite different given the technology landscape:
modern operating systems supports fonts better, and some of the webfonts
specifications in web standards changed as well. The whole feature should
be redone, although unfortunately this is not currently on the top of the
Language team's priority list.

That said, I'm ALWAYS willing to hear about _problems_ in different
languages. AFAIK, the issue with Persian is that the text is usually
readable, but not as elegant as it should be, although I'm very interested
in hearing more details. For some other languages, especially of South and
South East Asia, fonts are not installed in operating systems at all, so
they are completely unreadable, although this is getting better in the
latest versions of desktop Linux, Android, Windows, Mac, and iOS.

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

----------
From: Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson@kiwix.org>
Date: Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 8:56 AM
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Hi Amir

On 19.04.2017 09:21, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> They can be enabled by clicking the gear icon near the Languages list, then
> clicking "Fonts", and checking "Download fonts when needed".

Thank you, I found it... I read in the past about that option but was
not able to find it on my screen... I was searching in the usuable user
preferences where - to my taste - this option should be proposed.

> This was on by default for some time in 2013, but it turned out to cause
> severe performance problems and was made opt-in.
>
> By 2017 the issues are quite different given the technology landscape:
> modern operating systems supports fonts better, and some of the webfonts
> specifications in web standards changed as well. The whole feature should
> be redone, although unfortunately this is not currently on the top of the
> Language team's priority list.
>
> That said, I'm ALWAYS willing to hear about _problems_ in different
> languages. AFAIK, the issue with Persian is that the text is usually
> readable, but not as elegant as it should be, although I'm very interested
> in hearing more details. For some other languages, especially of South and
> South East Asia, fonts are not installed in operating systems at all, so
> they are completely unreadable, although this is getting better in the
> latest versions of desktop Linux, Android, Windows, Mac, and iOS.

I'm interested by that feature in an offline context. Many users have
been complaining for a longer time because of problems with the display
of Wikipedia content in certain languages (I guess the similar one like
with online Wikipedia).

As we were not able to create ZIM files with a correct management of the
js/css (offline mockup of the resources loader), my answer was always
the same: we need first to mockup offline the behaviour of the resource
loader to be able then to load web fonts correctly.

We are now so far: we pretty much load the correct js/css resources...
So I had a look to that problem again - more accurately. I have
discovered that in fact our scrapper does not load any web fonts... and
here I'm.

I don't think we will have big performance issues as everything is
anyway offline (please correct me if my guess is wrong), but I need
somehow to tell our scrapper (so the Wikipedia API) to deal with web
fonts... how should I do that?

Regards

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