Talk:Universal Language Selector

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Universal Language Selector/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

inside the english wikipedia we are able to use several other types of decorative fonts for userpage editings. in the si:wikipedia.org(sinhala wikipedia project) we only have one default font available for that language. is there someone who can make it so we can use few other famous free licensed sinhala decorative fonts inside sinhala wikipedia?

i did ask the one and only most active admin in that project here, he says he dont have the technical knowledge for this, hence im seeking help here.

below are some free licensed sinhala fonts:

• font.akasa
• sinhala-font

The style guide on English Wikipedia lists the CSS statements that can be used to set font families. However, whether these fonts display correctly or not depends on whether the end user has the fonts installed on their device. This means that while you can follow the same approach to specify Sinhala decorative fonts, there is no guarantee that all users will see them unless they also have those specific fonts installed.

Additionally, the Universal Language Selector (ULS) is designed to host fonts that are necessary for reading text, ensuring accessibility across different languages. It does not provide decorative fonts for stylistic purposes, which is why you may not be able to see a variety of Sinhala fonts through ULS.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T58939

We'd like to add a Nastaʿlīq (also written Nastalique, Nastaleeq, Nastaliq) font, but so far no free one was found. There is one which is worth asking about to the author.

I would like to request the default font for Urdu to be a Nastaliq font like Jameel Noori Nastaleeq, Urdu Typesetting, etc. This proposal has been twice rejected here so I am raising the issue on the ULS. Further details can be had there. Hope no one objects...

What font do you suggest? We did some research and Nafees Web Naskh was the only recent free font available, see bugzilla:46693. The others were either obsoleted or unfree.

I was asking for a Nastaliq font, of which the best I've found is "Jameel Noori Nastaliq". Naskh (Nafees) is not the standard way of transcribing Urdu.

That is, http://www.urdujahan.com/font.html ? Thanks for letting us know. The website and zip don't contain any information about licensing; another website says "License: freeware". If you wish this font to be included, please contact the author and ask a free license to be included. Also see Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector for more instructions.

This all requires some further clarification:

• At a unicode level, this all uses arabic text (as far as I'm able to tell, and I'm not sure if there are differences in shaping)
• Nastaliq is the traditional writing style of Urdu language.
• Due to the availability of Naskh scripts (which are also easier to render due to more consistent line height), it has become more common for urdu to be represented in naskh in digital media.
• This is considered to be undesirable however.
• There is no known free nastaliq font.
• There are however nastaliq fonts available on Windows 8, but since they share the same script, they apparently don't really get easily selected by the font systems.
• There is a desire to make https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Script/Nastaliq unneeded, but this is a requirement that ULS cannot fulfill because of the above reasons

So some points to address:

1. A free Nastaliq font is desirable and
2. En.wp doesn't really know what the Urdu wikipedia community thinks of this, it might be useful to figure that out.
3. A temporary solution might be to make it possible to redefine system font styles in a certain language. So you could have in the font drop down for urdu:
   1. nastaliq system

      font-family: "Jameel Noori Nastaleeq", "Urdu Typesetting", sans-serif;
      

   2. NafeesWeb
   3. system default

There is a nice article on Nastaliq typesetting here

BTW, if Fraktur is an ISO15924 defined script variant, it makes you wonder why the different arabic script styles are not/should not defined. There was a very long discussion about this on the unicode mailing list that I have not yet entirely read: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m11/0094.html

There is this old non-unicode Nastaliq SIL font: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Nastaliq Not usable of course, but perhaps SIL. Open font library has Hussaini Nastaleeq though, which is MIT (X11) licensed apparently and a descendant of Nafees Nastaleeq. Might be interesting ?

As you can see in bugzilla:46693, we were aware of the former, but not of the latter. It says however that it's a fork from CRULP's Nafees which, in the version linked from the bug, was not free; the page it links is down but Internet Archive has a copy, the license is not standard. It should be clarified whether the author got from CRULP permission to license his derivative under MIT license, or what.

@Nemo_bis Doesn't NafeesWeb have the exact same license though ? http://www.cle.org.pk/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesWebNaskh.html

For that one Kartik found a waiver. Have you read the bug that I've linked about half a dozen times by now in this thread? :)

Well that information isn't in the ticket that I read. It is however hidden in the commit message.

Not sure if this is still an open issue. Could Noto be a possible free font?

https://www.google.com/get/noto/#nastaliq-aran

Its free. 103.94.130.3

Is there a way to see a list of languages which can be selected using ULS on Wikimedia Commons?

In which context on Wikimedia Commons? I can think of at least two: user interface language selection and description language in the Upload Wizard. There may be more.

The issue has been resolved with new MW 1.40.0

Hello,

I use MW 1.39.3 at my wiki family. I have interwiki links and don't need ULS so far. But interwiki links do not work without the extension at Vector-2022. How can I disable ULS but have my interwiki links?

This question would be more appropriate to developers of the Vector skin.

Thanks! I'll try to make a request them.

The issue has been resolved with new MW 1.40.0

I want to add a basic font, using common.css for English readers - unfortunately, @import has been disabled. There is clearly a perfectly rational reason for it to be disabled by default, turning it back on is probably obvious, in some clearly defined settings file. However, I just want to use a web-font, this seems to be the simplest way to do it.

Please educate me on the reason why it is turned off by default, and how to turn it back on.

If you want to change a font for everyone, the Universal Language Selector extension is not the best way to do it. You can use normal CSS in MediaWiki:Common.css, or maybe there are other extensions to do the same.

@import has been disabled in MediaWiki:Common.css. I don't know why. It doesn't matter, I will manually install a font, however annoying, or use an extension of some kind. But again, hoops where the simplest command, could have prevented hours of toil.

Seems especially weird considering there's input methods for just about every language and script on the planet, but none for two of the most commonly spoken languages in Asia… am I missing something, here? When selecting an input method, "Asia" there's about a hundred languages, including Chinese, but no Japanese and no Korean.

Seems like a huge problem to me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

A volunteer has actually started working on support for Korean recently, and it may be deployed soon. However, the Korean script is actually quite simple and a keyboard for it is relatively easy to implement.

Japanese, in contrast, is very complicated. In theory, it can be done, but it will require very complex mapping between syllables and more than a thousand characters. Because of the complexity, the loading time can be prohibitive, too.

Chinese indeed has an input method in Universal Language Selector, but it only outputs Pinyin, which is a relatively simple Latin-based transcription system. A full-fledged input method for Chinese characters would be a bit similar to Japanese, but even harder, so it's unlikely to be implemented here.

Luckily, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese don't actually need special support, because they have been well-supported in all major desktop and mobile operating systems for more than twenty years, and the people who write in them know how to enable and use these keyboards.

The keyboards in Universal Language Selector are mostly targeted at people whose languages are either not supported in operating systems at all (this is true for many languages of Africa), or languages that are supported, but aren't actually used very much by the public for various reasons (languages of India).

closed; thanks for /qqq update.

CC is for Creative Common licence ? Coding Convertions ? or ... ? Thanks. -- Christian 🇫🇷 FR (talk) 07:39, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Closed captioning.

I have a german wiki and am currently working on an english translation. You can track wich language someone is using by implementing some code like this:

{{#ifeq: {{int:edit}} | Edit | English | Not English }}

it returns "English" if someone is using english and "Not English" if someone is using a different language. With this I reworked the whole sidebar to link on their english equivalents if using the english wiki. Now I'm trying to change the link of the logo in the top left corner. I know you can change it by editing the "Mediawiki:Mainpage" page. I tried using this

{{#ifeq: {{int:edit}} | Edit | EnglishMainpage | GermanMainpage}}

but it will always link to the "GermanMainpage". Is their a way to redirect someone on the english/german Maipage by clicking on the logo dependent on wich langauge they have selected?

Ungetestet, aber als Idee:

• Wenn du deine Mainpage als Special:MyLanguage/Mainpage verlinkst und die Versionen davon als Mainpage/de und Mainpage/en anbietest; genauer gesagt: du dich für eine dieser beiden Sprachvarianten als Stammseite entscheidest und die andere als eine von mehreren Übersetzungen dieser Basisversion, dann könnte das vielleicht klappen.

Ansonsten werden dafür gern JavaScript-Gadgets verwendet.

• Siehe w:de:WP:JS sowie w:de:WP:HW.

Danke, das mit dem Special:MyLanguage/Mainpage hat geklappt. Die Hauptseite war sowieso schon übersetzt unter Hauptseite/en.

@PerfektesChaos Ich möchte mich auch für den Tipp bedanken. Konnte damit auch den Logo-Link sprachbezogen machen.

Wäre toll wenn das in die Hilfe der Translate Extension aufgenommen würde.

indonesia

Edit MediaWiki:mainpage-url. If the target is a translatable page, you can use Special:MyLanguage link to redirect to the interface language if available.

Is there a simple list of the available fonts, with links to examples, that can be utilised across the WMF wikis? About the only place that I can find anything that resembles a list is at the git repository, and such a list is hidden away, and not particular user friendly. Is such a list possible, and if it more relates to WMF only, should that then be placed at meta, or is it a subpage from the main namespace page, if more generic? Thanks.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/WebFonts#Selection_of_fonts has a list of languages and default fonts. But there are more fonts than this that are not mapped to any language because they are special fonts to be applied outside the user preferences. Example: Unifraktur is supposed to be applied to a cetain section of wikisource content irrespective of users preference by specifying the font-family style explicitly. And these fonts are not meant for Mediawiki interface fonts. You are right, a list would be nice so that people can choose them and apply wherever relevant. A bit manual effort based on the git repo is needed. Is this something you can help us? Otherwise I will ask my team to consider doing it. thanks!

It was I who raised the WS-related question, and the non-working of the explicit application of the webfonts. Once that issue is resolved, then I can look to assist resolving that component. So the questions that come with that are

1. Can all the fonts be explicitly user-derived with the expressed methodology?
2. Do all the fonts fall under this extension?
3. So would a help page be best here (as a subpage presumably), or at one of the other WMF wikis if there a separate means to add fonts individually per wiki, or for WMF.
4. Is that directory of the repo the only place that contains the fonts, or non-language specific fonts? If not, where are the others located?