[Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts on Mobile

[Amir E. Aharoni]

[Was: Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects]

2011/12/14 Pradeep Mohandas <pradeep.mohandas at gmail.com>:
> Curious: Is anybody testing this for mobile web?

I am doing my best to test it in any mobile phone and tablet upon
which i come up, but we cannot systematically cover all the possible
devices and mobile OS versions. That's where the community comes in -
please test it in any device you can find and report bugs!

The WebFonts extension is deployed for all supported languages in
translatewiki.net and is updated several times a day with the newest
changes. Please feel free to create WebFonts testing pages there.

The short summary of my tests is that:
* WebFonts are just ignored in older versions of Android, in the
various Mobile Windows versions, in Symbian (Nokia) and in Blackberry.
* WebFonts may work on the newest Android versions, but i did very
little testing on that, and it changes between browsers.
* WebFonts are loaded on Apple devices like iPhone and iPad, but not
always rendered correctly.
* WebFonts work well in devices that run a real GNU/Linux OS, such as
Nokia N900. Very sadly, such devices are expensive and rare.
(<rant>It's just criminal how Nokia markets them so weakly.</rant>)
* <biased-opinion>My impression is that mobile Firefox (a.k.a Fennec),
in general, has better support for i18n, like web fonts, fonts in
general and right-to-left languages, but please test for yourself and
don't take my word for it.</biased-opinion> (Disclaimer: I'm a
volunteer Mozilla Rep.)

> I have started trying to read ml.wiki on my cell pointing my phone
> browser at ml.m.wikipedia.org and all I get are boxes right now.  I'm
> using Opera Mini browser on a Nokia E63.

WebFonts are not currently deployed on Malayalam and Tamil Wikimedia
projects. These are probably the same squares you would see a week
ago.

WebFonts are deployed on translatewiki.net and on test.wikipedia.org,
so again - please test them there as much as possible. You can also
try testing in other languages of India.

--
Amir E. Aharoni
Wikimedia i18n team