#MediaWiki #Webfonts - real problems and luxury problems

The prime objective of MediaWiki is to serve Wikipedia pages. The prime objective of Wikipedia is to share in the sum of all knowledge. In order to achieve this goal, the content has to be readable and get to its audience. Once this is accomplished, any further improvements are the icing on the cake. They are the nice problems to have.

The Webfonts functionality was introduced to prevent "tofu". Tofu is named after tofu, the soya based ingredient, because it is typically served in rectangular blocks. When you are served tofu, you do not get to see the meat of the matter. You cannot read what is on a page. Consequently, Webfonts were introduced to prevent this epic failure.

As mentioned before, when the same technology can be used for cosmetic reasons, it will be used for a secondary goal. When the requirements of such secondary goals prevent the primary goal of serving data, the priorities are dead wrong.

When the use of Webfonts for cosmetic reasons is considered, the bandwidth it uses is a luxury, the performance it asks of servers is a luxury. This does not make Webfonts a luxury, its primary purpose is still to prevent tofu and consequently serve our prime directive. Consequently, it is not a question for any operations staff to consider if Webfonts should run or not. At most it is for them to decide if Webfonts in its current incarnation is good enough to serve fonts to make Wikipedia look pretty.

This issue is not understood by many people who dabble with the Wikimedia infrastructure. This becomes clear when you read some of the responses to the excellent explanation by Niklas. To put it bluntly, the decision if primary functionality can be removed is not an operational but a business decision. Given the consistent failures to protect this primary functionality, it has become an issue for the highest level of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The place of #language support in #MediaWiki support

At this moment #Wikipedia has 280+ versions. They represent 280+ different languages. Every language is written in a script. This script may be from right to left (eg Latin), from left to right (eg Arabic). Top down is not yet supported.

All these languages use Unicode to represent the characters in their script. As a consequence it is "just" a matter of configuring a language correctly and it will work in a wiki. The characters used in a script have to be defined in Unicode. Without this supporting a language is problematic. An example of this is the SignWriting script and all the sign languages. They are not supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and they are developing their software themselves.

When people want to have their own Wikipedia, they have to localise the MediaWiki software at translatewiki.net. This is a requirement for the people that request a new project to fulfil. All that is required to support another language is some configuration.  To support all languages other than English, MediaWiki developers have to internationalise their software. This is a well established process, there is nothing special in there for "small languages", it is the same process for any language.

When people use MediaWiki it can be assumed that they use any of these 280+ languages. It cannot be assumed that they know any other language than their own. The Universal Language Selector allows people to select the language they need for their user interface. They can choose a language by typing in the name of their language in their own language.

Once a languages is selected, MediaWiki supports both input methods and web fonts. This is necessary because most devices do not support all the languages MediaWiki supports. At this point a user can read and write in MediaWiki. A special case is the OpenDyslexic font; is enables 7% of a population to read their language with less effort. This font works only for many languages that are written in the Latin script like English.

One other aspect of language support is in enabling search in all the 280+ languages. This is where Wikimedia engineers may have to do special things for a single language. When they do this well, they only have to do this once. Typically however, setting up search for a language is well documented, it is part of international standards.

Language support for MediaWiki is nothing but internationalising the software and for being mindful that MediaWiki is used by people representing over 300 cultures and languages. There is no special consideration for small or big languages.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikimedia #HOWTO - Supporting dyslexic people

One small detail that deserves much more attention is the ability to support people who are dyslectic. This support is thanks to a wonderful little project called OpenDyslexic. It is a font that is designed in such a way that most persons with dyslexia find it a lot easier to read.

There are several reasons why our support for dyslectic people deserves more attention;

• seven percent of a population is dyslectic
• people who have found how to enable this font are happy
• we do not know how many people use OpenDyslexic
• we are told that people find it hard to enable the font
• OpenDyslexic could be used for languages like Polish
• some languages cannot use OpenDyslexic because characters are not supported

The CEE conference in Modra was really constructive; so many subjects were discussed including OpenDyslexic. The bug to enable OpenDyslexic for Polish, indicates that many of the things discussed are actionable and are being acted upon.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Writing #Cuneiform on #Wikipedia

When you always wanted to write in the cuneiform script on Wikipedia, now you can. Technically there is not that much to it.

{{Cuneiform|{{linktext|𒄖|𒉈|𒅁|𒌨|𒅎}}}}

This is what it took to get the text you see on the infobox of the cuneiform article.
....
This is fun, nice but not all there is to it. What is really exciting is that you can now write in many, many scripts and expect that the person will see the text properly.

It is no longer necessary to create a screenshot. If anything, this is the time to find all those screenshots and replace them with the proper text and invoke the ULS and its webfonts.
Thanks,
      GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia II

The good news is: the Open-Dyslexic font will be part of the initial roll out of the "universal language selector". The font is already available for some 25 languages on Wikidata and translatewiki.net where the "universal language selector" is already deployed. These languages are listed below.

• en - English,
• af - Afrikaans
• ca - Catalan
• cy - Welsh
• da - Danish
• de - German
• es - Spanish
• et - Estonian
• fi - Finnish
• fo - Faerours
• fr - French
• ga - Irish
• gd - Scottish Gaelic
• hu - Hungarian
• is - Icelandic
• it - Italian
• lb - Luxembourgisch
• mi - Maori
• ms - Malay
• oc - Occitan
• pt - Portuguese
• sq - Albanian
• sv - Swedish
• sw - Swahili
• tr - Turkish
• wa - Walonian

Many languages are missing in the list. For me the lack of nl - Dutch is obvious. But I do not have to break a sweat to come up with languages like sr-Latn id tl li gl fy sl. Languages like Indonesian or Tagalog are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. 

When you consider that languages with special characters like Icelandic and French are in this list it is obvious that many more languages are already supported by this font. When you consider that the WMF has good relations with the creator of the font it is more than likely that missing characters for your language can be added  to the font.

So check out first if all the characters used in your language are supported by the Open-Dyslexic font. If it is, ask for it to be enabled either by making the request on the support page of translatewiki.net or by requesting them on bugzilla. You can also send a mail with this happy news to all the teachers you know. When it is not, identify the missing characters and, ask nicely for them to be added.

Open Source is such a wonderful enabler. Consider; not only is this font available to all the teachers and the sufferers of dyslexia, it is also available for use on websites like Wikipedia. Given that our aim is to share in the sum of all knowledge this is an important step in the right direction.

Thanks,

       GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia

Today I was able to make some difference. I met a teacher who is specialised in children with "special needs". The conversation got onto the subject of language technology and I mentioned the existence of the Open-Dyslexic font.

She was so happy to learn about the existence of this font. She asked me to send details today so that she can install the font on her pc tomorrow. This week she is going to meet some thirty persons who will be happy to learn about the existence of this freely licensed font as well. A lot of children are going to benefit.

I cannot wait for the Wikimedia Foundation to make the Open-Dyslexic font available for use on its wikis. It will affect so many more people. It is likely to be mentioned in the international press; it is that relevant.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Open #Wikipedia for people who are #Dyslexic II

Great ideas are not uncommon. I am really happy to learn that Reedy had the idea to support the Open-Dyslexic font in MediaWiki before me. As you can see in the screen shot, progress has been made.

It is now just a question of dotting the i and crossing the t and pushing it out.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Open #Wikipedia for people who are #Dyslexic

We have the technology to make an important improvement for the usability of Wikipedia. The technology exists in the ability to provide web fonts from within MediaWiki. The opportunity is to improve the readability for people who are dyslexic.

What it takes is to enable web fonts functionality on for instance the English Wikipedia and allow the use of the Open-Dyslexic font. The license is a bit weird for a font but it is within what the WMF is comfortable with; the CC-by license.

It should not take long to appreciate why this is a good idea.. it should not take too much after that to help people with dyslexia.
Thanks,
    GerardM

#Font support by #Google and #Wikimedia

The quality of the Amiri font has been recognised by the Wikimedia Foundation for some time; it has been provided in the Web Fonts extensionn for some time and recently in an other bit of "read the whole article to get to the good news" it became part of a Wikimedia supported jQuery library for web fonts.

Google has also recognised the Amiri font; they make Amiri available through their "early access" program. Google supports multiple (freely licensed) Arabic fonts as web fonts. The biggest difference for me between the two programs is that the WMF library has your server provide the fonts while the Google offering has the fonts provided through the Google infrastructure.

Both Google and WMF support fonts for many scripts. The question is what they will do when the font has technical requirements that are more than usual.

Recently the Tuladha Jejeg font for the Javanese script was given a free license and the Wikimedia Foundation will assess if they will include it in their Web fontd extension. There may be a technical problem; it makes use of the SIL Graphite technology. The question is to what extend do browsers support this technology.

When Google is serious in supporting the rare scripts, the opportunity to support the Javanese script through the Tuladha Jejeg font may be reason enough to put some extra effort in enabling support for SIL Graphite.

<grin> One may hope for Google to do more good, we know they can</grin> <seriously> For the WMF there is hardly another option when they are to support Javanese </seriously>
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Language, #script, #Unicode, #font and web fonts

Making the Internet globally accessible is more then running cables. It is also about making sure that you can read and write any language. Once all this is in place, people enabled in this way can share in the sum of all knowledge.

There are few people as intimately involved in supporting languages than Michael Everson. He is known for encoding scripts into Unicode, this requires both technical and linguistic expertise and finally he is a publisher of books written in minority languages.
Enjoy,
     GerardM

Michael at Chogh Zanbil - Cuneiform .. :)

Are all scripts registered yet ... do we know them all in ISO 15924?
No, not at all. The best-known scripts have been given four-letter codes in ISO 15924, but we tend to be conservative for lesser-used scripts, and try to co-ordinate with proposals for encoding them in the Universal Character Set (a.k.a. ISO/IEC 10646 or Unicode).

Several scripts are not yet encoded in Unicode. Many of them are used by living languages.. How do languages cope?
A script (or character) not encoded can't be used in interchange. People can either use the Private Use Area or hack an existing encoding.

What does it do to the cultures involved ?
The lack of an encoded script prevents a language from using its script effectively in any computer environment.

Is it known how many scripts used by living languages are not yet encoded ?
I don't think we have kept a quantitative inventory. And we always discover something new. I know of a number of specialist scripts like SignWriting and Blissymbols which have not been encoded. We are working on some other scripts, like Woleai and Afáka, and a number of West African scripts, but it is very difficult to contact the user communities to get feedback. There is a huge technological divide. (Not for SignWriting or Blissymbols: for those the problem is a lack of funding to do the work.)

Is it known how many scripts used by dead languages are not yet encoded ?
Again, we don't keep a quantitative inventory. The Roadmaps on the Unicode site are as good a checklist as anything.

Several scripts are encoded but there is no freely licensed font for them. Why is this not part of the process of encoding for Unicode ??
The Universal Character Set is a character set. Both ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and the Unicode Technical Committee work to study character and script proposals, give the characters the right properties, and get them encoded. It is not the function of either committee to establish implementations, or to give them away. The work is already voluntary (and expensive).

MediaWiki supports web fonts ... What relevance does this have for you, what opportunities are there for the Wikimedia communities
It is a great opportunity for Wikimedia to exploit some of the generosity of the many people who have donated to the foundation, and to make good use of the skills of people who have expertise in the Universal Character Set and in font design.

What impact will the availability of freely licensed fonts have on the availability of information in those scripts
For instance, right now anyone viewing any Wikipedia in any language may encounter text in Ol Chiki, or in Runic, or in the simple International Phonetic Alphabet, and pages have to apologize to the reader because their computer may not display the material correctly. This is *bad* for the encyclopaedia.

What difference would it make if the Wikimedia Foundation were to become a player in the development of fonts
People using the encyclopaedia would be able to see the information without worrying about seeing ☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐! From a personal point of view, I can say that at various conferences over the past two years, I have spoken with people in the Wikimedia Foundation, and with people from another very large organization, about this matter -- specifically about exploiting my own expertise in the Universal Character Set and in the provision of rare scripts and characters in web fonts -- yet nothing has resulted. I think the message has got through. But so far no one in either organization has decided to take the necessary principled decision that in order to ensure that the information in the Free Encyclopaedia is actually available to people who use it, complete UCS support should be provided in a suite of freely-available and maintained webfonts.

Provenance is the basis for the establishment of facts. Is transcription in the original script essential ?
Why wouldn't it be? That's the source text. Encoding it correctly means that it can be interpreted by the reader if he or she wishes to consult the primary source. Anything else obliges the reader to use someone else's interpretation. Of course expertise is needed, but the closer one can get to the primary source, the better.


Michael, why "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" ?

I love languages, and it has been a great honour for me to publish Alice for the first time in a number of minority languages which might otherwise never have seen the text. Alice is available in the following languages: Cornish, English, Esperanto (Kearney), Esperanto (Broadribb), French, German, Hawaiian, Irish, Italian, Jèrriais, Latin, Lingua Franca Nova, Low German, Manx, Mennonite Low German, Borain Picard, Scots, Swedish, Ulster Scots and Welsh  and several others translations are being prepared.

Supporting a #font for #Arabic III

 a new contextual shape for
a faa-yaa combination

The "Amiri" font is available as a web font for the Arabic language in the projects that have the WebFonts extension enabled. One example of the Amiri font in action is on the English Wikisource.

The recent release of the "Amiri" font improves the readability of Arabic texts and it includes Latin characters as well. The readability improvements are very welcome. These Latin characters however are excess baggage when you use Amiri as a web font.

For many people the availability of a web font for the Arabic script is news. The new release will have to be assessed for its technical aspects. Butchering the font and remove the Latin script seems obvious. It just needs doing,
Thanks,
     GerardM

Turkish Lira is supported in #Unicode

When #Turkey selected a new symbol for its currency, the Lira, it had to make sure that people can actually use it. Given that almost all modern computing is done with Unicode fonts, it was important to have the symbol included as soon as possible in Unicode.

The Turkish Lira will be supported in the Unicode 6.2 release that was just announced for the third quarter of 2012. The next step is to have the symbol included in fonts. A font that includes the new symbol can already be found on the website of the Turkish central bank.

In a previous Unicode release the Indian Rupee was introduced. The question is very much to what extend and at what pace people will have updated fonts that includes such symbols. The Wikipedia article on the Indian Rupee uses an image.

It is possible to create a font that includes characters like these currency symbols and make use of the WebFonts extension. In many ways it is more elegant than using graphics.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Font subsets IV

After installing #Fontforge, I still have to use it for real. The problem I want to solve is to reduce an existing font in size and reduce its use to only one script.

There are many fonts around that include everything and the kitchen sink too. When the only thing that is needed is a specific font for use on a specific webpage, it does not make sense to send the excess bulk as well.

Fontforge as a tool is intended to build fonts. My intention of reducing a font in size is a use case that seems not to be what the tool is there for. I do not know the tool really so I am looking for help. The ultimate goal is to have efficient web fonts for every script.
Thanks,
     GerardM

A #font for ancient scripts

#Wikipedia refers to and #Wikisource includes sources that were written millennia ago. Sources that inform us about when what is now the western culture was centred in places like Athens, Crete or Karnak. The scripts used were different from modern scripts but like modern scripts many of them can and did make the transition into the digital age. They were encoded in Unicode and there are fonts available for these scripts.

George Douras has been really active in the creation of fonts for ancient scripts. There are many available from his website. The message about licensing is plain and simple and is probably all that is required. George is happy to see his fonts used as webfonts and is willing to help when there are issues with his font.

The list of what he has on offer is impressive:

Aegean Numbers, Alchemical Symbols, Anatolian Hieroglyphs, Ancient Greek Musical Notation, Ancient Greek Numbers, Ancient Roman Symbols, Arkalochori Axe, Arrows, Basic Latin, Block Elements, Box Drawing, Braille Patterns, Byzantine Musical Symbols, Carian, Combining Diacritical Marks, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Combining Half Marks, Control Pictures, Coptic, Counting Rod Numerals, Cretan Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation, Currency Symbols, Cypriot Syllabary, Cypro-Minoan, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Supplement, Deseret, Dingbats, Dispilio tablet, Domino Tiles, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Egyptian Transliteration characters, Emoticons, Gardiner set of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, General Punctuation, Geometric Shapes, Gothic, Greek and Coptic, Greek Extended, Hieratic alphabet, IPA Extensions, Last Resort font glyphs, Letterlike Symbols, Linear A, Linear B Ideograms, Linear B Syllabary, Local variants of Ancient Greek and Old Italic alphabets, Lycian, Lydian, Mahjong Tiles, Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, Mathematical Operators, Maya Hieroglyphs, Meroitic, Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A, Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows, Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs, Miscellaneous Technical, Musical Symbols, Number Forms, Old Italic, Old Persian, Optical Character Recognition, Phaistos Disc, Phoenician, Phrygian, Playing Cards, Sidetic, Spacing Modifier Letters, Specials, Superscripts and Subscripts, Supplemental Arrows-A, Supplemental Arrows-B, Supplemental Mathematical Operators, Supplemental Punctuation, Tai Xuan Jing Symbols, Transport And Map Symbols, Troy vessels’ signs, Ugaritic, Yijing Hexagram Symbols, Text Fonts based on the work of Firmin Didot (1764-1836), Richard Porson (1757-1808), Victor Julius Scholderer (1880-1971), Alexander Wilson (1714-1786), Claude Garamond (1480-1561), Demetrios Damilas (c. 1493), Robert Granjon (1513-1589) et al.

The MediaWiki WebFonts extension is enabled on Wikisource. It is therefore for the Wikisourcers to make their pick and ask on Bugzilla for a specific font.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Font subsets III

#Google web fonts is important. A major player makes freely licensed fonts available for general use. They allow people to be more expressive because the right font adds to the message. They allow people to contribute to existing fonts and make new fonts available.

Both Google and the Wikimedia Foundation invest in freely licensed web fonts and because of this, an opportunity for cooperation exists. The Wikimedia Foundation supports all languages in all scripts particularly for use in its projects and Google supports the world with its Google docs where people can use web fonts in their own documents and in their own language.

As the two organisations complement each other so well, it would be great when they share their web fonts. Wikipedia can become more expressive and for Google docs usable fonts can be associated with the languages that they support. A combined outreach of Google and the WMF will make web fonts even more visible and it will make the effort of both organisations even more relevant.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Font subsets II

A request by Glanthor made on the Wikitech list was to support Junicode as a web font for historic texts. When you read about the Junicode font on sourceforge, you find that it supports 3250 characters in the "regular style". Its speciality is supporting medievalists in their work and it supports many scripts. It is a really big font.

Arguments to support Junicode:

• it is a freely licensed font
• it has a clearly defined use case

Arguments against the use of Junicode as a web font:

• it is really big
• it does not target one script
• it is only one font for a script

When you read the Wikipedia article on the Runic script, it becomes abundantly clear that the Runic script evolved over time. Not only does the shape of characters change, the number of characters used is different as well. This is perfectly normal and it argues against the use of a single font for a single script.

As Junicode is freely licensed, it is possible to break the font up in pieces and have a separate font to be used  for Runic and another for Gothic. When other fonts for Runic are available as well, we can show sources with a font that resembles the original best and provide a more familiar font for easy reading as well.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Font subsets

A font with all the characters for the Latin or Cyrillic script is big. Over a mega byte big. This is considered too big for use in a web font particularly when mobile devices are targeted as well. For this reason, moves are under way to split mega fonts in subsets.

At SIL they are working on font subsets. Their criteria is to include all the characters used in a given "region".  In this way they explicitly target a range of languages. It does reduce the size and one font can be used as a web font for all these languages. When they are to be used on Wikipedia, it will still be necessary to identify the specific language and have the language associated with a particular region.

Typically a font does not include all characters anyway. It is created with a language in mind and when another language needs extra characters, it is tough. Many languages do use the same subset of characters and when a font is identified as complete for one language, it follows that it is complete for all other languages as well.

SIL needs a way to subset its existing fonts. Google in contrast provides many fonts as web fonts that provide subsets of the Latin script. As it is not made obvious if these fonts support languages like German, French or Dutch, it is not really attractive when English is not your language.

Both Google and SIL provide solutions. The key question they do not explicitly answer is: does it support my language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#WebFonts for the #French #Wikisource

Following the deployment of the WebFonts extension on the English Wikisource, it is now the French who asked for WebFonts. With WebFonts it is possible to show selected texts in a specific font. At this time the selected texts will not be in French because no fonts are available for the Latin script.

Once content is labelled as being in a different language, it is obvious what texts are in French or in another language. This will not only trigger WebFonts for the languages with a default font, it will also help people analysing the content of the French Wikisource.

WebFonts is a tool that delivers fonts where needed. So far we have not really considered supporting languages in the Latin script with WebFonts. When there are fonts that serve a purpose and are freely licensed, adding support will certainly be considered.

One of the issues that we will have to consider is how to support the really big fonts. When they support multiple scripts it does affect the time it takes to send a font to the user.  This is one area where local fonts and web fonts substantially differ.

Historic scripts like Runic and Cuneiform but also modern scripts like the Latin script have evolved a lot over time. To do justice to this and to differences in different places, it will be important to have fonts that reflect these differences.

With the interest of the Wikisourcerers we may learn from them about the fonts available under a free license that do justice to all such considerations.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The #Santali language and the Ol Chiki script II

A request for a #Wikipedia is made for the Santali language. The request was made for use with the Latin script but Santali language is also written in the Ol Chiki script. It stands to reason that when a language is written in multiple scripts, it is relevant for the people who read that language to have fonts available for all the scripts in use. It is unlikely that the Ol Chiki font is part of any standard operating system.

When you are interested in an Ol Chiki font, one resource that pops up when you search for it is Wesanthals. Several fonts can be found at this website. Sadly they are not available under a standard free license. The good news is that we are reaching out to developers of Ol Chiki fonts.

When we do have fonts available under a free license, we can provide support for the Ol Chiki font in WebFonts. A text in Ol Chiki will be tagged like this:

<div lang="sat-olck"> ᱐</div> or <span lang="sat-olck"> ᱐</span>

Thanks,
     GerardM

#WebFonts for the #Tibetan #Wikipedia

Some time ago we enabled the Jomolhari font on translatewiki.net for the Dzonghka language. It is not only Dzonghka but also the Tibetan language,  Denzongkha and the Ladakhi language that use the Tibetan script.

Being able to support the Tibetan language is particularly relevant as there is a Wikipedia in this language. For this reason the Jomolhari font was enabled for Tibetan as well and we are now looking for confirmation from the Tibetan community that they are happy with the result.

As you can see on this user page at translatewiki.net, the standard text shows readable Tibetan thanks to the WebFonts extension. The text to the right in the Babel user information however shows the Unicode blocks. This indicates that WebFonts does not get triggered.

As you can see in the edit screen, the text is explicitly marked as Tibetan. When WebFonts is enabled on a Wiki and when Tibetan is configured  with one or more fonts, Tibetan will show properly. The HTML in the Babel user information however does not include a language attribute. It should.
Thanks,
       GerardM