Dear all,
As requested at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Mumbai last weekend by Srikanth, and also in bug 32619[1], Narayam was just enabled on Wikimedia Commons. I hope you find it useful.
Thank you!! :) It will be put to good use lot of Indic wiki users who are regular to commons.
During the hackathon we had a lot of help in adding more key mappings to Narayam[2], and we are right now at the Red Hat offices in Pune working together with their localisation team for Indic languages to verify and get feedback for more Indic languages. The recent work may be deployed next Monday (28/11), but it could also be delayed a week. The complete Wikimedia Localisation team is travelling home this weekend, and we haven't reviewed all the code yet, hence the possible delay.
Am particularly excited on the "On screen keyboard"[1] done by Abhijeet Pathak which will be of great help. Some UI changes / testing may be needed, but on-screen keyboard will be amazing especially for people who are new to the typing even phonetically.
Another exciting feature we are planning on deploying and enabling on many Indic language projects to increase accessibility, and that we would like to have your feedback[3] on is WebFonts[4]. Many languages do not have proper fonts easily available to users.
This may be because the operating systems do not ship these fonts, the
script has fonts but users don't know from where they will get them from or
how to install them in their system. Another reason is because the user is reading the
wiki from a shared computer without these fonts. Sometimes it may be
because the user does not know how to configure the operating system for
a language or the user does not have enough permissions to do this.
Because of all these reasons, providing the content in certain languages
is problematic. WebFonts sends the fonts with the data and therefore we expect that everybody can see the text correctly.
Webfonts is great thing in technology and its great that wikimedia wikis are geared to use it, thanks to the i18n team. I know a lot of font testing was done at hackathon, but before deploying webfonts, we must ensure that the selected fonts are usable / bug-free on all the languages. As for Tamil, until the Lohit-Tamil hinting issue is resolved / better free fonts emerge out, please do not deploy Webfonts for Tamil wiki projects since it affects readability to everyone and as decided and agreed there wont be any preferences. I would suggest all communities which plan to use Webfonts, do proper font-testing since its very important and iron out all the bugs before launch for a smooth experience.