There are two ways of doing this; you can opt to change the direction globally or you can choose to have a button override it on an edit page. These two options have been there for quite some time, they have been essential for us to support right to left oriented languages.
Nikerabbit added a new gadget the other day; they allow us to change the text area font style. There are three three styles: monospaced, sans and serif. In a previous blog post I mentioned that Firefox was broken for the Lingala wikipedi. This is actually not the case; the problem is that monospaced fonts have been selected for Firefox and this is what makes Firefox, Safari and Opera break.
Monospaced fonts do not support characters like "ɔ́" properly, but the sans and serif fonts work as they should in most modern browsers.. Internet Explorer is broken because it does show the wrong characters, Chrome is broken because it does not show a character.
Thanks,
GerardM
4 comments:
Note that it isn't true that "monospaced fonts don't work". Character display depends on the font, the software, the version of the software, and the system. It may well be that on a particular system, the particular monospace font in use doesn't properly display the given characters, but this can't be generalized to a recommendation like "never use monospace fonts", as it won't solve your problem.
Please show me that monospaced fonts work for the example at hand. As it is having monospaced fonts break the support for Lingala always.
Thanks,
GerardM
As discussed on IRC:
http://leuksman.com/misc/yesitworks.png screenshot of it working just fine in Firefox 3.0.5 on a Mac
There were several additional "it works for me" reports from people on various Linux and other systems.
This is *not* a "monospaced" issue. It's an issue specific to the specific system, software, and fonts involved on a particular machine. Where many machines are similarly configured, and we can reasonably estimate that a large portion of visitors will have a similar configuration, then it makes sense to test for settings we can make that maximize functionality for that configuration.
But this is *not* the same as saying "monospace fonts never work for this character". Until we can move to that second level of reasoning about particular configurations, we can't do more than voodoo tweaks. :)
When a "voodoo tweak" works, I am perfectly happy when it works for the majority of our users for now.
While it is good for now, it does not appeal to a sense of how things should be. So by all means let us find a good solution as well.
Now a good solution is one that works for the many people that suffer from the problem. This may mean that we are stuck with a "voodoo tweak" until we can make a proper solution work for our editors.
Thanks,
GerardM
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