Tomos wrote;

I tried the timeline feature on test wiki using Japanese text. It seems it does not work properly. Would someone take a look?

Hi Tomos,

EasyTimeline uses Ploticus for the actual rendering. Ploticus has never heard of html characters.

Ploticus can be extended (by recompiling with freetype support, I don't know if the current version on test has this capability) to handle unicode, but EasyTimeline has no support for that yet, I already planned to look into it in the near future (after wikistats for wiktionaries are live).

Of course Ploticus requires a unicode font on the server for generation of static images (png).

There are only a few fonts available that contain a good portion of the unicode character set in one font. One is 'Arial Unicode MS', 25 Mb!, which comes with MS Office, hardly an inviting proposition for WikiMedia :) Another one is a shareware font, called Code2000, which is a work of love of one person, James Kass (http://home.att.net/~jameskass/) and has gained quite a reputation over the years. I'll happily pay the $5 license for Wikipedia (really a bargain for what it contains).

Later, when wikimedia has svg support, timelines can also be viewed in this scalable vector format, and rendering occurs then on the client machine, like with html, and depends on availability of the specified font on that client machine.

I will extend the syntax so that any font name can be specified for png (as said it should be available on the server) and svg generation.

Cheers, Erik Zachte