Some of the less common languages on Wikipedia use scripts which are not supported by default on most operating systems. In many cases, these scripts may be unavailable even to native speakers of that language. The same applies to mathematical fonts.
For example, the following languages seem to use scripts currently not supported by the fonts installed by default on a MacBook running MacOS 10.6.7:
bn, bpy, kn, ml, te, am, arc, dv, km, my, si, bug, got, lo, or, as, cu, ti
Other operating systems may have even fewer scripts supported.
However, all of these scripts appear to have Free font support, as shown by their all being rendered on my Linux box, after having installed a variety of Free Software fonts that are part of the Debian distribution [see note below]. As far as I can see, none of these appear to have significant font-shaping issues, with only the occasional glitch in some languages such as Oriya.
This means that, on modern browsers with both @font-face and UTF-8 support, we should now be in a position to support all of these scripts, even if they are not supported by the user's installed fonts, by adding @font-face declarations for Free Software fonts supporting these scripts, and hosting these fonts on WMF servers.
In addition, doing this for mathematical fonts would have immediate utility for all language versions of Wikipedia.
Would anyone be interested in helping support this?
-- Neil
Note: the non-mathematical Debian font packages currently installed on my Linux box are as follows:
ttf-alee ttf-arabeyes ttf-arhangai ttf-arphic-ukai ttf-bengali-fonts ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-bpg-georgian-fonts ttf-dejavu ttf-dejavu-core ttf-dejavu-extra ttf-devanagari-fonts ttf-dustin ttf-dzongkha ttf-farsiweb ttf-freefont ttf-gentium ttf-gujarati-fonts ttf-indic-fonts ttf-junicode ttf-kacst ttf-kannada-fonts ttf-khmeros ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-lao ttf-liberation ttf-malayalam-fonts ttf-mph-2b-damase ttf-opensymbol ttf-oriya-fonts ttf-paktype ttf-punjabi-fonts ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sil-abyssinica ttf-sil-charis ttf-sil-doulos ttf-sil-gentium ttf-sil-padauk ttf-sjfonts ttf-tamil-fonts ttf-telugu-fonts ttf-thai-tlwg ttf-thryomanes ttf-tmuni ttf-unfonts-core ttf-unifont ttf-uralic
On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
This means that, on modern browsers with both @font-face and UTF-8 support, we should now be in a position to support all of these scripts, even if they are not supported by the user's installed fonts, by adding @font-face declarations for Free Software fonts supporting these scripts, and hosting these fonts on WMF servers.
In addition, doing this for mathematical fonts would have immediate utility for all language versions of Wikipedia.
Would anyone be interested in helping support this?
Have you seen http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts ?
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Hoi, We are in the process of getting the WebFonts extension reviewed. The first iteration is to provide webfonts to those Wikipedias that have serious problems with attracting their audience because of the lack of fonts on the computers on many people's computers.
When you want to provide support for the scripts you mention, it makes equal sense to identify the languages these fonts are to provide. That means that it has to be coded as using templates does not scale over all our wikis. Thanks, GerardM
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/05/mwhack11-templates-do-not-scale-...
On 21 May 2011 13:08, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Some of the less common languages on Wikipedia use scripts which are not supported by default on most operating systems. In many cases, these scripts may be unavailable even to native speakers of that language. The same applies to mathematical fonts.
For example, the following languages seem to use scripts currently not supported by the fonts installed by default on a MacBook running MacOS 10.6.7:
bn, bpy, kn, ml, te, am, arc, dv, km, my, si, bug, got, lo, or, as, cu, ti
Other operating systems may have even fewer scripts supported.
However, all of these scripts appear to have Free font support, as shown by their all being rendered on my Linux box, after having installed a variety of Free Software fonts that are part of the Debian distribution [see note below]. As far as I can see, none of these appear to have significant font-shaping issues, with only the occasional glitch in some languages such as Oriya.
This means that, on modern browsers with both @font-face and UTF-8 support, we should now be in a position to support all of these scripts, even if they are not supported by the user's installed fonts, by adding @font-face declarations for Free Software fonts supporting these scripts, and hosting these fonts on WMF servers.
In addition, doing this for mathematical fonts would have immediate utility for all language versions of Wikipedia.
Would anyone be interested in helping support this?
-- Neil
Note: the non-mathematical Debian font packages currently installed on my Linux box are as follows:
ttf-alee ttf-arabeyes ttf-arhangai ttf-arphic-ukai ttf-bengali-fonts ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-bpg-georgian-fonts ttf-dejavu ttf-dejavu-core ttf-dejavu-extra ttf-devanagari-fonts ttf-dustin ttf-dzongkha ttf-farsiweb ttf-freefont ttf-gentium ttf-gujarati-fonts ttf-indic-fonts ttf-junicode ttf-kacst ttf-kannada-fonts ttf-khmeros ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-lao ttf-liberation ttf-malayalam-fonts ttf-mph-2b-damase ttf-opensymbol ttf-oriya-fonts ttf-paktype ttf-punjabi-fonts ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sil-abyssinica ttf-sil-charis ttf-sil-doulos ttf-sil-gentium ttf-sil-padauk ttf-sjfonts ttf-tamil-fonts ttf-telugu-fonts ttf-thai-tlwg ttf-thryomanes ttf-tmuni ttf-unfonts-core ttf-unifont ttf-uralic
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Sat, 2011-05-21 at 12:08 +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
This means that, on modern browsers with both @font-face and UTF-8 support, we should now be in a position to support all of these scripts, even if they are not supported by the user's installed fonts, by adding @font-face declarations for Free Software fonts supporting these scripts, and hosting these fonts on WMF servers.
Just to remind that one more use case is for all Wikipedias to use additional @font-face declarations on pages that contain uncommon characters.
On 22/05/11 12:22, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Sat, 2011-05-21 at 12:08 +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
This means that, on modern browsers with both @font-face and UTF-8 support, we should now be in a position to support all of these scripts, even if they are not supported by the user's installed fonts, by adding @font-face declarations for Free Software fonts supporting these scripts, and hosting these fonts on WMF servers.
Just to remind that one more use case is for all Wikipedias to use additional @font-face declarations on pages that contain uncommon characters.
That would be fantastically cool, albeit needing yet another pass over the output text in order to check its characters against the various character sets supported by different fonts.
However, since as far as I know all or almost all of the usable public code points are in Unicode planes 0 and 1, all of this could be achieved by building a single 8k bitmap, and then mashing this together with the corresponding bitmaps for each font. In any case, most articles in most Wikipedia editions would already be dealt with by the default fonts on most platforms, so the overhead would be quite small. We could potentially use user-agent sniffing to detect common operating systems, so we could make a good guess at the default set of fonts already installed.
Also: the Gnu Unifont, although it is a fairly low-resolution bitmap font, is an excellent fallback font for most scripts that don't have elaborate combining rules or font shaping; just serving WOFFs derived from this as @font-face fonts by default for some of the wikis with less-common scripts would be very useful indeed.
-- Neil
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org