Talk:Universal Language Selector/WebFonts

FYI: when using the mediawiki editor, if one goes into settings (by clicking the keyboard in the lower right corner of the editing window and then the gear… Display … Fonts) one sees this:

Font settings

<checkbox> Download fonts when needed Download missing fonts automatically and allow selection of preferred fonts. More information

That is, it links here. I find that the information on this page doesn't help me understand the pros and cons of changing this setting. I would guess that there's a reason it's currently turned off by default (I'm guessing my setting is the default setting) but can find no reason here. It would be helpful if it linked to information (whether here or not) that helped viewers who aren't web font experts nevertheless make a relatively informed decision.--Elvey (talk) 18:30, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

You can safely enable the preference. If the site feels slower for you (because of the additional loaded fonts), you may want to disable it. Ah, sorry, forgot one thing: do not enable it if you're uncomfortable with some (or potentially all) pages you read being logged (on a WMF server to which about 70 WMF employees have access). --Nemo 22:58, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Maybe it's just coincidence, but ever since I enabled it, I can't read certain font formatting. I enabled it so I could read Burmese, since FF on Win7 does not have Burmese language support. But then I noticed that a lot of other fonts went blank – not to unicode-numbered boxes, but a long blank space about the length the text would be if I could see it. This is the case for anything coded as Yoruba, for example. I can see it just fine in the edit window, and if I copy & paste the blank space, in which case it's normal text, but i can't see it when it's formatted with the lang template. Also, I can't see a lot of the language names in the iw list (where the cog to enable this is), such as Bavarian. Again, I can copy the blank, and it pastes as Boarisch, which is completely in the basic Latin alphabet. On Wiktionary too, a lot of entries are blanked if they're formatted to a specific language. When I had this feature enabled, I could see Burmese in the main text, but not Burmese section headers, either here on on WP-my. Now that I've turned it off, I can no longer see Burmese, but the other font problems are still there. I've cleared my cache and deleted my cookies, but even when hitting 'random article' to go somewhere I've never been, many of the iw links are still blanked. Kwamikagami (talk) 23:25, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

This sounds a bit like bugzilla:63718, may be fixed in few days on your wiki. In the meanwhile, try and use monobook instead of Vector, let us know if things improve. --Nemo 08:19, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. (PS, I had already been using Monobook on those wikis, just not here.) Kwamikagami (talk) 16:48, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply and info. How 'bout a lede or other section that summarizes the situation for users? A start:

Major pros and cons of enabling Webfonts: Major Pros: It's safe to enable. Text is displayed properly even if you don't have an appropriate font installed when you visit web pages with text in non-latin script. Major Cons: Sites may load slower (because of the additional font loading). Page views of users who enable webfonts are logged (to a WMF server to which about 70 WMF employees have access.

--Elvey (talk) 22:01, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

This is a help-like page, feel free to edit. :) Remember that not all ULS users are on Wikimedia projects though. --Nemo 22:05, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, but I'm trying to get some feedback/suggestions first.--Elvey (talk) 03:43, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Typo about Tamil free font

"it has been kept as and optional font" should be " it has been kept as an optional font". ("and" to "an")

Myanmar Nay12345 (talk) 13:34, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

ျမန္မာ Nay12345 (talk) 13:34, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Merhaba

sende kimsin aga

WebFonts on mobile site

WebFonts option is only available on desktop version. Is there any way to use WebFonts on mobile view without changing to desktop version? Ninja✮Strikers ^«☎» 04:32, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

Article badly out of date

This article is concerned with software problems from many years ago. No substantive changes have been made since 2016. Much of what it discusses is a series of unfortunate missteps of the past, now a bunch of moot points. For someone who just wants to be able to use ULS fonts, it's forbidding and profoundly confusing.

Also, some parts of the discussion go off into the weeds. For example, "macOS and Windows have fundamentally different philosophies when it comes to rendering text. macOS uses anti-aliasing to smooth text, while Windows Vista and 7 use a technology called ClearType to render more detailed text." Those are not fundamentally different philosophies for rendering. ClearType (aka subpixel rendering) was simply an antialiasing strategy which, by the way, was also adopted by macOS at about the same time. This was back when we had 72 or 96 dpi screens. Now that displays have very high density ("retina displays"), subpixel rendering is rarely used.

I have no background with ULS. I do not know for what languages it is still necessary or useful (after all, Unicode and operating system implementations have been evolving constantly). Perhaps someone who knows the topic could chop out the incorrect and obsolete paragraphs to make a more concise explanation of the current state of affairs?

Note: this matters because a link to this page has been placed in the fonts tab of the Language settings dialog in the new interface that was recently rolled out to English Wikipedia. Perhaps that link should be removed… Justinbb (talk) 18:25, 6 March 2023 (UTC)