Hoi, The notion that our editors should decide if a font is well enough supported is a bit off. It is saying "you cannot properly write your language because ...". I do appreciate that TECHNICALLY you are right. However what is needed is people adding the "new" glyphs to the font. This is no rocket science.. we can do this. Thanks, GerardM 2009/9/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com > On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm using Chrome 3.0.195.21, and have long found that some characters > > in Wikipedia render as boxes. One example: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_with_stroke renders as "<box> > (minuscule: <box>)..." > As the article says, the characters were only added to Unicode in 2005 > and 2006. It's to be expected that even good Unicode fonts might not > yet support them. The article even notes that few fonts support the > characters. > > Now, I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters > > and the advice is not very useful or specific: it says that "Special > > symbols should display properly without further configuration with ... > > Safari and most other recent browsers." I tried installing Gnu Unifont > > and setting it as the default browser font, but that seems to be > > overridden by MediaWiki anyway? > No, GNU Unifont probably just doesn't have those characters. The > default fonts on Ubuntu seem to have the majuscule but not the > minuscule (or at least that's how Chrome and Firefox both render the > page). > > So anyway, I'm asking two questions: > > 1) What can I do to get more special characters to render correctly in > Chrome? > Get better fonts. Realistically, you should do this by waiting a few > years until your preinstalled fonts hopefully support the character. > > 2) Could/would anyone improve [[Help:Special characters]] to make it > > clearer, more specific and correct? > It needs to note that there's no font out there that really supports > *all* of Unicode, especially since Unicode keeps changing. Wikipedia > editors need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a Unicode > character is supported widely enough to justify using it in an > article's text, or whether an image should be used instead. > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hoi, This specific character mentioned in the article is used to write the Tanimuca-Retuarã language. This is specified in the article. itself. Languages that need characters that are missing in fonts that are in general use are not isolated affairs. In the end there is only one solution; we should be part of a solution that allows us to show all characters. Thanks, GerardM 2009/9/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com > On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Gerard Meijssen > &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > > The notion that our editors should decide if a font is well enough > > supported is a bit off. It is saying "you cannot properly write your > > language because ...". > No, it's not. We're talking about a specific article on the English > Wikipedia about a single obscure character, and related cases where > isolated characters don't display properly. Nothing I said should be > construed to have any bearing on radically different situations, such > as an entire wiki whose language is poorly supported on common > platforms. While I appreciate that you take a great interest in > technical topics related to internationalization, this is not such a > topic. > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hoi, I have been told off list that Windows-7 supports this character by default. This is one valid reason to choose Windows-7 for your operating system. It is also a challenge to other operating systems to be as good. Thanks, GerardM 2009/9/25 Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt;

Tei wrote: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unicode and its related templates. -- Neil

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 6:13 AM, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: That's why I said "and related cases where isolated characters don't display properly". The solution is to not use poorly-supported Unicode characters in articles. No, there's no better solution. It's just the same as using fancy new HTML5 features that aren't widely supported, or whatever. That's the price of using evolving standards with multiple implementations instead of a homogeneous one-vendor system. There's not any that I know of. Go figure out how to propose the idea to the Unicode Consortium if you like. On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 7:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The relative merits of operating systems are not relevant to either this topic or this list. On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 7:17 AM, Tei &lt;oscar.vives(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Wikipedia will not set a default font for Latin-based scripts at any time in the foreseeable future. We need to respect users' choice of default font wherever possible. (For some languages' scripts this may not be practical, but that's a separate issue.) As far as I know, most browsers these days will try to use any available font that has the character in question if the specified font doesn't have it. I'm not totally sure about that, though. It still doesn't solve the problem that some characters aren't supported in almost any commonly-available font.