Agree with Srikanth on WebFonts. We at the Tamil Wiki projects have already tried the webfonts out and found the Lohit Tamil - the font available via webFonts extension has serious readability/rendering issues in most operating systems (most except Redhat Linux). It is a big step backwards in usability for those who have better system fonts (which in Tamil is like 85-90% of the reading public). The i18n team is not giving the option of making the system font default. It is either webfonts with Lohit (or other faulty fonts) as default or no webfonts at all. [1][2] So in case of Tamil, the community will not ask for the webfont extension, until we have a bugfree freely licensed font.

Our advice to the other communities is to thoroughly test this in all operating systems and then decide if the font webfont extension is offering as default is worth forcing everyone to switch. In fact please discuss anything that the i18n team is offering thoroughly and test it before going for a rollout. Because once the rollout is complete, your control is lost and you will be entirely at the mercy of the i18n team about any changes [1]

My request to the i18n team is to discuss with the stakeholder communities, well before you start developing new extensions. Talk with us Give us a feature road map and develop software to suit our requirements and needs. And please dont go for one-size-fits-all solutions. As of now, the inverse is happening. We are being given products and enhancements without our consultation. Any request to roll back/change is met with refusal [3]. As demonstrated in the case of Lohit-Tamil and Webfonts, it took a face to face meeting at Mumbai Hackathon and comparing the font rendering in different machines, before an i18n member would admit there was an issue. Before that i18n team was casually dismissing our concerns without listening to what we were saying.[2] In Tamil Wiki webfont case we were lucky that we had a Hackathon happening shortly and Srikanth was there to raise the issue in person with Santhosh and the Lohit developer (Redhat). If this is the case with Tamil where we were fortunate enough to have a developer amongst ourselves, untested rollouts of extensions are going to cause more serious issues in relatively undermanned wikis. Though the development is done in good faith, it cant get live without user testing / quality acceptance.

I hear there are more such extensions in the pipeline from the i18n team. My sincere request to you guys is this - talk to your end users (us) before you plan the features and develop them. Requirements gathering from users is supposed to be the first step of any software development. Instead of waiting for feedback until you are ready for deployment and then arguing about the feedback, getting early feedback will everyone save time.[1] The WMF features team did the same type of mistakes with Feedback tool, image filter, Wikilove and the AC Trial. They appear to have learned from the community reaction and have hired Oliver Keyes to engage with the community on such issues. [4] You can atleast talk to us and find out what we actually require before forcing us to accept what you got or/and trying to convince us that it is good for us.

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31936 [2] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/11/freely-licensed-fonts-are-ugly-n... [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32257 [4] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/255518

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 6:34 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.comwrote:

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 18:03, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland@wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

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.

[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/11/narayam-will-look-like-this.html

-- Regards Srikanth.L

---

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On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 20:53, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

So, if I'm understanding the issue correctly, the open source font in Tamil is inferior to the proprietary font that many users have installed, correct?

Exactly.

I recall brief discussion about this at the hackathon, but I don't remember the answer:

The agreed answer was to improve Lohit-Tamil and fix issues before using it on Webfonts instead of getting to develop/use preferences which Tamil community originally suggested. Fixing issues is good in the sense, mediawiki / wikipedians dont just consume opensource, they contribute back, but realistically might take little longer. I am willing to help, just that I need to learn and do things :)

Is it possible to implement the font delivery in such a way that the superior proprietary fonts are specified as preferred, and the inferior open source fonts are specified as fallback, so that users who have the superior fonts installed will not see any change?

As per Santhosh, "Spying the system" is not possible currently and hence we cant know that there are fonts on the system, leave alone checking if they are superior. I was wondering if this requirement can go into HTML5 if it makes sense / feasible, but thats a long way out.

(NB - as Siebrand noted, the i18n folks are traveling right now, so it

may take a few days to continue this conversation with everyone involved.)

We shall wait :)