On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Michael Everson everson@evertype.com wrote:
At 09:25 +0900 2008-07-24, Kyaw Tun wrote:
Dear All,
I have forwarded my proposal of creating new Wikipedia with Zawgyi font to Mr Wales. This show our purpose of creating http://myanmarwikipedia.orgmyanmarwikipedia.org as well as imitating Wikipedia theme. I wish he also forward his reply too.
The Zawgyi font is not compliant with Unicode and I will have nothing to do with it.
Thanks for your understanding.
Zawgyi encoding is non-standard and have to be eliminated grandually by Unicode 5.1 encoded font. But for the time being, people don't like other font than Zawgyi.
Htoo Myint Naung have been talking only about my.wikipedia.org. We want to get that working correctly, to ensure that recommended fonts are *actually* Unicode compliant, and to ensure that appropriate input methods are available for users, again, cross-platform if possible.
Please keep trying. But also note there are three FOSS Unicode 5.1 fonts (parabaik, myanmar3, padauk) available since 2008 April. Also check out our Keymagic http://code.google.com/p/keymagic/, Buglishhttp://code.google.com/p/burglish/and WaitZar http://code.google.com/p/waitzar/project for input method implementation.
So I suggest you to make a temporary Zawgyi encoded Myanmar Wikipedia sharing the same database with http://my.wikipedia.org/my.wikipedia.org. So people can happily contribute. You can terminate Zawgyi wikipedia in appriorate time.
I think it would be better for that to continue as it is. Once the my.wikipedia.org is working then content from the other site could be migrated.
Sure. Let me know if you need any help. We will provide Unicode 5.1 version too. Conversion is already in the pipeline.
We be note our home page do not contain commerical outbound links as you can see home page of http://my.wikipedia.org/my.wikipedia.org.
What "commercial outbound links"?
Check out your main page archive.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
Wikimy-l mailing list Wikimy-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimy-l
Best regards, Okisan
Kyaw Tun wrote:
Please keep trying. But also note there are three FOSS Unicode 5.1 fonts (parabaik, myanmar3, padauk) available since 2008 April. Also check out our Keymagic http://code.google.com/p/keymagic/, Buglish http://code.google.com/p/burglish/ and WaitZar http://code.google.com/p/waitzar/project for input method implementation.
Michael, can you share with us what is wrong with parabaik, myanmar3, padauk?
I want to make sure I understand something....
If we set the encoding on the site to utf-8, then anyone can use any myanmar Unicode 5.1 - compliant font to look at it. This is in the situation in English, right? Wikipedia sends me bytes in utf-8, and then my browser can render it with any normal font... ariel, times roman, comic, whatever I please.
So, what difference is there in this case? If there are Unicode 5.1 fonts, perhaps incomplete, perhaps complete, then fine. People can use those. What would the problem be with this? Would it render the site unusable for people who are using only Zawgyi?
At 16:47 -0400 2008-07-24, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Michael, can you share with us what is wrong with parabaik, myanmar3, padauk?
They may all be compliant with Unicode 5.1. They probably are. They may or may not have support for minority-langauge characters or for some special Sanskrit-language shaping behaviour (important for Buddhist terminology.) I have proposed that we initiate a test suite to determine what the capabilities of each font are.
I want to make sure I understand something....
If we set the encoding on the site to utf-8, then anyone can use any myanmar Unicode 5.1 - compliant font to look at it.
No. That's not enough, because a user could look at a page with a Unicode 4.1 font -- and get an unreadable result. Or a user could look at a pseudo-Unicode font like Zawgyi (and there are others)
This is in the situation in English, right? Wikipedia sends me bytes in utf-8, and then my browser can render it with any normal font... ariel, times roman, comic, whatever I please.
That works because all the fonts have the same encoding.
So, what difference is there in this case? If there are Unicode 5.1 fonts, perhaps incomplete, perhaps complete, then fine. People can use those. What would the problem be with this? Would it render the site unusable for people who are using only Zawgyi?
We don't want people creating text using Unicode 4.1 fonts or Zawgyi or other non-conformant fonts. We want text to be conformant, interchangeable, cut-and-pasteable, and so on.
Zawgyi was a solution, but its users must migrate. There are costs to that, but we can't support Zawgyi. (We could convert its glyphs and encoding to 5.1 conformance for people who like it, in principle.)