After these bugs were filed SVGtranslate was internationalised in many languages including Malayalam. It will likely be localised in all the Indian languages we have Wikipedias in. These maps are relevant to all these Wikipedias. It may even stimulate more people to create maps of districts in other Indian states.
This bug is a show stopper. It may be that once these applications are updated, we need to support more fonts in our SVG engine. Many fonts have been selected already for the WebFonts extension...
Thanks,
GerardM
PS it is not only Indian languages that will benefit
2 comments:
Have you heard of the Gentium unicode fonts? it's a free typeface available in almost all linux distros.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=gentium
It's specifically designed with helping internationalization and language support, from the statement:
"Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin- and Cyrillic-based alphabets."
While it doesn't support malayalam, it's quite helpful for non english romance texts.
Now I don't know the proper process to get a font added to wikimedia support, but it seems the list linked at [[m:SVG fonts]] hasn't changed in 3 years.
I requested on 2009 that this font be considered (it's high quality, freely licensed, and the designers are sensible to the language support issue)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:SVG_fonts#GENTIUM
yet it seems nobody answers but echo.
Given you're more aware and knowledgeable about internationalization issues, as Thelma once mentioned to me, I'd like to kindly ask your help on submitting this request properly on the appropiate place?
Also, the version of DejaVu Sans on the thumbnailing server is ancient. This is the default sans-serif font, so it would be nice to get it updated. The problem is, I think Tim Starling might be the only person with the confluence of knowledge and access needed to fix these problems, and of course he's busy rewriting MediaWiki to use hiphop (among other tasks), so it may be a while.
Post a Comment