Friday, February 24, 2012

#Webfonts for an #English language wiki

When a project wants the #MediaWiki WebFonts extension they can ask and, the Localisation team is quite happy to provide and support it on an "as is" basis. Consequently as there is a request from the English Wikisource, we are really happy to grant their wish.

When you read the request, it becomes obvious what the purpose is for the web fonts; grammar books are mentioned; Gesenius' Hebrew GrammarGrammar of the Burmese Language and Sanskrit Grammar and we do have fonts for these languages.

Obviously texts in the English language will not be affected. We do not support fonts for the Latin script yet but we could when it makes sense. The texts that are to be affected by WebFonts need to be identified as being in a specific language. For Hebrew it would be something like {{Lang-he}}. 


The Localisation team wants to have a better user interface to indicate texts in another language. This is when we expect to be ready to suggest enabling WebFonts on something like the English Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

3 comments:

Michael Everson said...

I *have* signalled my readiness and willingness to participate in such activity.

Filceolaire said...

So could the Irish language wikis have an option to use a [[Gaelic type]], like I was taught to write in the early 1960s (they switched to standard english fonts in 1966, half way through my schooling).

GerardM said...

When a font is available in the "Gaelic type" as a freely licensed font, yes it would be possible. Using templates in this way is not likely.
Thanks,
Gerard