Skriftspråk
Den här sidan ger grundläggande information om stöd för diverse aspekter av skriftsystem; språk skrivna i olika skriftspråk; skrivriktning; typsnittsrendering och inmatning.
Digraphia
Digraphia refers to the phenomenon that multiple writing systems or orthographies are used in a single language. Since Wikipedias, as the first use case of MediaWiki, are created on the basis of spoken language, it effectively renders wikis in these languages as multi-locale ones.
Language Converter
Language Converter is a MediaWiki module automatically translating the source code of a page to a different writing system or orthography of the same language on the fly. It allows the source code to be written in a mixture of writing systems, and to be rendered based on the preference of the user.
Language Converter introduces a series of markups exclusive to pages having it enabled. Please see Language Converter/Advanced syntax for more information.
Handling digraphia in non-article scenarios
HanAssist is a convenience script on Chinese Wikipedia aiming at simplifying UI text switching in JavaScript based on user variant preference.
For interface text on the backend, {{int:Conversionname}} (and the {{Lan}} template on Chinese Wikipedia, based on it) can be used to determine the preferred variant and invoke conversion accordingly.
Skrivriktning
Most writing systems operate as characters written left-to-right (LTR), with lines stacked from top-to-bottom (TtB).
A few common scripts (Arabic and Hebrew in particular) write characters right-to-left (RTL)—see directionality support for more details on how we handle right-to-left and mixed bidirectional text with HTML output and CSS styles.
Note that an individual language can be used with scripts that have different directionalities, such as Kazakh and Kurdish which support Latin and Arabic variants.
Note also that the World Wide Web Consortium has defined more directionalities for the use in web pages, such as North East Asian top-to-bottom ones, with lines stacked either from left to right or right to left.[1]
Font rendering and input
Many scripts do not have proper fonts easily available to users. This may be because operating systems do not ship these fonts, or users don't know how to install them or don't have enough permissions to do this. The UniversalLanguageSelector extension tries to solve this by embedding the fonts in the wiki itself. Fonts will be served from the server and the user's system would not need to have the fonts installed.
UniversalLanguageSelector adds support to be able to type a certain script, so users do not have to rely on external tools or support on their systems.