On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.com wrote:
Agree with Srikanth on WebFonts. We at the Tamil Wiki projects have already tried the webfonts out and found the Lohit Tamil - the font available via webFonts extension has serious readability/rendering issues in most operating systems (most except Redhat Linux). It is a big step backwards in usability for those who have better system fonts (which in Tamil is like 85-90% of the reading public).
So, if I'm understanding the issue correctly, the open source font in Tamil is inferior to the proprietary font that many users have installed, correct? I recall brief discussion about this at the hackathon, but I don't remember the answer: Is it possible to implement the font delivery in such a way that the superior proprietary fonts are specified as preferred, and the inferior open source fonts are specified as fallback, so that users who have the superior fonts installed will not see any change? If so, is there a reason not to resolve the issue that way until we have better open source fonts?
(NB - as Siebrand noted, the i18n folks are traveling right now, so it may take a few days to continue this conversation with everyone involved.)
Erik