On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 1:34 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, As I have to spell it out for you:
- Wolof: 3,612,560 people
- Swahili: 772,642 first language 30,000,000 second language users
- Xhosa: 7,214,118 people
- Zulu: 7,214,118 first language 15,700,000 second language users
Dejavu status:
zu Zulu 100% (52/52) 100% (52/52) 100% (52/52) sw Swahili 100% (52/52) 100% (52/52) 100% (52/52) xh Xhosa 100% (52/52) 100% (52/52) 100% (52/52) wo Wolof 100% (66/66) 100% (66/66) 100% (66/66)
(http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/dejavu/tags/version_2_24... unfortunately the status hasn't been updated in a little while)
For those who are unware the Dejavu fonts are a family of high quality truetype fonts (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) with a fairly wide coverage of unicode.
Dejavu does not yet cover all of unicode (the most notable big gaps are the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character sets). The primary reason Dejavu does not yet cover everything is because quality is the highest priority (well below being free). A comprehensive font which is ugly or otherwise has poorly matched characters (incompatible metrics and such) is not something that many people will want to use if they have any choice. Most modern systems can substitute characters from other fonts if the selected font has holes in it, so Dejavu allows that to happen until it has quality replacements that fit nicely with the rest of the characters.
Dejavu's focus on quality means that it's suitable for everyday use by everyone with a supported language, and not just by extreme-polyglots who are perhaps more tolerant of ugly print. Dejavu has been the default font set on the current GNU/Linux distributions for some time now.
I'm sure the Dejavu folks would welcome contributions from Wikimedians interested in improving the coverage and quality of the font.
It may also make sense at some point to declare it to be the 'standard font' for the projects, and prefer it via CSS for improved consistency as well as support for the panoply of bizarre characters that even English Wikipedia utilizes. (at least for users who are willing to download it and install it... at well over a megabyte for the complete character set, sending it dynamically is pretty much out of the question! ;) )
(Preferring something like the currently non-free code2000 font would also provide better coverage of unicode... but on most projects doing so would get you shot: that font is not visually appealing in the slightest)
It is people who speak languages. It is people we aim to provide information to.
As to the Mozilla Foundation; the point is that our aim is to provide information to all people. It is essential that the infrastructure is there to achieve it. Fonts are essential in this game. The Mozilla foundation is to provide functionality to people that are already on the web. In what we aim to do, we do not say that people have to be online in order to be part of our potential public.
Indeed. Fonts are important. But they are important to a great many people outside of Wikimedia. Other projects like Fedora Linux, and OLPC depend on good fonts even more than we do, so the bulk of the work has already been done by others and is already freely available without any action on our part.
What gaps remain must be filled, but that is work that should be coordinated through the real heavy lifters in this space, and not Wikimedia which does not have a past history of font production or distribution.
Cheers