Topic on Talk:Universal Language Selector

After this implimentation, the default font of the tamil wiki is changed as "Lohit Tamil". This font is very small and little broken. can it be changed as "System font" as like earlier??

I do agree with Arafath.riyath. The font “Lohit Tamil” does not give proper appearance. The previous default Tamil font (system font) is much better in terms of appearance and editing. Lohit Tamil could be option if anyone likes to use, but set Tamil system font as default. --Anton017 (talk) 12:14, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Lohit Tamil is widely used in desktop linux distributions and the Android operating system. It's the de-facto open sourced font of choice for the Tamil script. In the web fonts of ULS we offer three more fonts for Tamil, as well as the choice to disable web fonts for Tamil.

Hi siebrand, Is it possible to keep system font (ta:File:Tamil_wiki_change_font.jpg) as the default font so that windows users will not be hindered by this change? Linux distributions and the Android operating system will not be affected because as you said “Lohit Tamil” is their system default font.

@siebrand, Request for Comment/Web fonts implementation for Tamil Wikimedia projects

Hello, I've read the whole page (not the Tamil talk, sorry) and in short it says 1) everyone could read everything before, 2) now nobody can't read anything; but I don't understand one thing: you seem to assume that everyone has the needed font installed locally. What's this system font you're talking about, what operating systems have it/them installed? If everyone has it/them, how comes you have e.g. a "font help" link in the sidebar?

To @Nemo: No we are not able to read everything as before. The Tamil rendering is scrambled up in iOS 6 (iPad mini) (File:Tawiki-safari-ipad-mini.png) and looks ugly in windows too ( ta:File:Tamil Wiki Font Change.jpg ). I request you to read this Request for Comment/Web fonts implementation for Tamil Wikimedia projects, except for the first para, everything is in English there.

Nemo, System font is not the name of a particular font. It denotes any font that is set as the default font in a user's browser. If it is a Unicode font supporting Tamil users can read Tamil. Not being to read Tamil is not anymore a problem with modern browsers and latest popular mobile OS like Android and iOS. The font help page you see is a legacy page help page that is not updated for last 3 years. Yes, still there are problems for reading Tamil in few starting level gadgets and this web fonts implementation was done as a remedy to fix it. But, this has introduced new bugs and affected many other popular OS environments which were working fine already. This new implementation was not beta tested and the community was explicitly against its implementation for the last two years.

Jayarathina, I did read the page, I had a specific question about it.

Ravidreams, thanks, I know that by "system font" you didn't mean a specific font; I asked what font(s) are included in the operating systems, as you say Tamil fonts are widely supported, because I'm interested in knowing more about such fonts. I'm glad to hear that the link in sidebar is useless for most people.

Nemo, The "font help" link in the side bar is mostly the legacy of competing encoding standards in Tamil during in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then unicode has become the standard tamil encoding system used everywhere. We have left the link in place for the sake of some gadgets.

Lohit Tamil is completely unsuited for Windows and that is where the vast majority of machines that access Ta wiki projects use. The unsuitability of Lohit Tamil is well known to Siebrand and Santosh. It was the very reason Webfonts was not rolled out in Ta wiki before. We have gone through this process once already. All we ask for is making "system font" option default and for the few people who dont have the system font installed (Latha in case of windows and Lohit Tamil in case of Ubuntu, Android and some other linux distros) they can go through the font help link and enable webfonts.

You can see the freaked out reaction of the community - this is not something people will get used to. It is makes site practically unreadable.

For Tamil, default font changed to system font in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/68350/

Santhosh, thanks for making the change.

1. When can we expect the change to go live?
2. Will the page load slow down bug remain even after making system font as the default? I mean will the web font script be downloaded even if the system font is the default? If yes, then it should be rectified and the web font script be triggered only upon choosing the web font from the drop down.
3. The language icon setting is missing in few pages. See bug number 7 here.
4. Suppose we make a new web font created and made available through services like http://www.google.com/fonts/ and https://typekit.com/ , can that be used in Wikipedia? Technnical aspects and licensing fee aside, is it philosophically aligned to be used within a Wikipedia project? Since only the content is under Creative commons license and we are not distributing the font, should the font be also under a Wikipedia compatible license?
5. It is better if the language setting icon is placed to the top right corner of the site or on that top row with clear label that says as "langauge and font settings". Even experienced Wikipedians are unable to find where the icon is located and how to change it. It is as good as hiding that icon. Besides, other languages section is a navigational aid and should not be coupled with a setting for user control.

The change went live a couple minutes ago, I now see ta.wiki using my system font.