Topic on Talk:Universal Language Selector

The Autonym font is not designed to display arbitrary text in all scripts.

For example it won't display arbitrary text in Chinese, or does not have correct coverage for displaying IPA transcriptions, and not even toponyms like country names (unless a few of them are needed later in the ULS if it has to include a regional selector for locales, instead of just a language selector: my opinion is that you'll select first the language using the Autonym font, but selection of regions will be fully translated with the rest of the interface, using a better font designed for that language with a more complete coverage of its native script).

The Autonym font also does not need coverage of most symbols, punctuations and digits (unless those characters needed for displaying some language names, including with disambiguation in parentheses).

However it should work to display at least all the language names listed in the ULS (or now proposed to be used in all wikis in language navigation bars, example at the bottom of Meta-Wiki main page). This means that its developement shoud monitor the evolution of the list of languages supported by Wikimedia (this font is not required to display all the many possible native language names in their script, until they get some some support in a Wikimedia site). This means that this font is only meant for usage in Wikimedia sites, or in sites that don't need more language names than Wikimedia.

Problems:

• the font does not work when rendering some languages (supported by Wikimedia sites) in their native scripts (severe issue, we only see square boxes).
  Demos (using <bdi class="autonym" lang="my">{{#language:my}}</bdi>):
  • Church Slavic (cu)

    словѣньскъ / ⰔⰎⰑⰂⰡⰐⰠⰔⰍⰟ

  • Sichuan Yi (ii)

    ꆇꉙ

  • Burmese (my)

    မြန်မာဘာသာ (may render however in some wiki sites that provide some font fallbacks)

• the font is poorly hinted for Georgian and some Indic language names in their native scripts, which are difficult to read:
  • Georgian (ka)

    ქართული

  • Sinhala (si)

    සිංහල

Some of them are already addressed in upstream and will be available in wikis in a week time. See https://github.com/santhoshtr/AutonymFont/issues for a list of known issues. We also get requests from third party users interested in this font to add more languages. That also being addressed(slowly).

The recent changes can be seen at https://github.com/santhoshtr/AutonymFont/commits/master

Considering the number of scripts to be supported, it takes some time to get all languages in it, but definitely we are working on it. Your comments are appreciated.

There seems to be a basic lack of testing. Maybe just check that stuff works at all before releasing it on the public. Details at Talk:UniversalLanguageSelector/AutonymFont#Testing flaws.

Verdy’s examples mostly look fine on my machine, except for the Burmese. Try this:

Default font:

• словѣ́ньскъ / ⰔⰎⰑⰂⰡⰐⰠⰔⰍⰟ
• ꆇꉙ
• မြန်မာဘာသာ
• ქართული
• සිංහල

Autonym font:

• словѣ́ньскъ / ⰔⰎⰑⰂⰡⰐⰠⰔⰍⰟ
• ꆇꉙ
• မြန်မာဘာသာ
• ქართული
• සිංහල

On my Safari/Mac, all of the text displays correctly with the default font (and my installed fonts). Autonym font doesn’t render the cu-Glag and ii text (but does render cu-Cyrl). It breaks the display of ligatures in my text. It makes the ka and si text render in a clashing typeface.

The name словѣ́ньскъ should properly be rendered in a Slavonic font (Cyrs) – modern Cyrillic orthography (Cyrl) is foreign to this language. The top of cu.wikipedia.org links to the KurKlim font, whose copyright notice says Mia tiparo. Libere uzebla por chiuj (“My font. Freely available to all.” in Esperanto).

[Updated: changed format for font name UnicodeBMPfallbackSIL → Unicode BMP fallback SIL to make it work in Firefox, in addition to Safari and Chrome. —Michael Z. 2013-11-18 16:07 z]

I also see these these texts displayed fine with the **default** fonts installed on my PC, but NOT when the font is forced explicitly to Autonym (via the CSS class).

Georgian and Sinhalese is also almost unreadable with the Autonym font, even if it can render it with big sizes. Hinting is the issue here, where some essential strokes are not visible at all at wiki default sizes (this should read OK for all sizes >= 10px, i.e. about 8pt on desktop/notebook, 6pt on smaller screens like smartphones).

Note: you include the additional font "UnicodeBMPFallbackSIL". This is stupid as this breaks completely the reason why this font was designed: reduced time and bandwidth to load many fonts in pages listing many language names. Don't do this! This class should only list that font (and should probably not even list the pseudo-font "serif" like it is in your message) !

The "autonym" class MUST reference only this font (plus "sans-serif": it won't break, if ever some other text like some wikitext gets rendered where only a language name should be shown, e.g. via a error in templates usage, or if the webfont is not loaded by the browser; "sans-serif" is the pseud-font used by default everywhere in MediaWiki). Note that the "Autonym" font is here a webfont coming from ULS, not your font "UnicodeBMPFallbackSIL", or the pseudo-fonts ("sans-serif" and "serif")

I include those fallback fonts for testing, so that any failures are evident.

“plus "sans-serif": it won't break” – yeah, that’s what the developers did, carelessly. Nothing appeared to break, so they went live with a feature without identifying basic failures. So don’t tell me what I’m doing is stupid.

I did not say that adding "sans-serif" was stupid, I understand the reason and gave it: the autonym webfont may not be loaded at all by browsers. What would be stupid would be to add your fallback font (or worse: other webfonts) in the list of fonts for the CSS class ".autonym" which must be retricted to use only .autonym {font-family: Autonym, sans-serif;} without anything else.

No, you are still misunderstanding.

I am saying that it is ineffective to test with font-family: Autonym, sans-serif;. When the Autonym font loads, any required characters that are missing from the font will be undetectable, because modern browsers will fall back to sans-serif, which, by Autonym’s design, will look pretty much like everything worked.

The only way to test whether Autonym renders all of the required characters is to add a visually contrasting font as fallback. So that gaps in its required coverage are evident. That is why I am testing with Unicode BMP Fallback SIL, which has full Unicode coverage and is not mistakable for any other font, and monospace, for everyone without that font installed.

The result is that in your sample above, all characters render and you can’t tell that anything is wrong with Autonym. In my sample, you can clearly see that Autonym is lacking glyphs for the Glagolitic and Sichuan Yi text.

I see now why you wanted to test it like that. Your first comment suggested to add these "contrasting" fonts in our CSS code on wikis, or directly on the "autonym" CSS class. Now I understand you want to test something else. Lets's return to the issue: - missing glyphs for some scripts - very poor hinting (even for Latin) for display on screen (it seems that the Autonym font uses in fact bitmap glyphs for low resolutions instead of hinting; I know that designing hinting in fonts is a complex task, still requiring costly professional font editors and skills; may be you should contact Michael Everson, member of the Unicode Consortium, which is also present on Wikimedia in the Language Comity; he's a great typographer that could help improve the rendering of this font)

Note that the Autonym font must be tracked for evolutions in the list of supported languages (this list is maintained by the Language Comity too), which will also decide on things like the text to display in code for their autonyms: each new supported language name should be displayable correctly with this font.

Here’s a screenshot of my sample above, on Safari 6.1/Mac, so you can see what I’m seeing.

Autonym font is not rendering the characters for Church Slavonic in Glagolitic script (cu-Glag), nor for Sichuan Yi (ii)