ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ:ଆଲୋଚନା ସଭା/WebFonts scheduled to go live on December 12

WebFonts scheduled to go live on December 12

Looking at a website, only to be presented with little squares is the result of a computer not having the fonts necessary to show the characters used for a language. There is a modern method of providing people with a missing font; this is done by sending a font together with the text that is to be displayed.

The Localisation team of the Wikimedia Foundation is working hard to finish the WebFonts functionality. This will serve you with freely licensed fonts when these fonts are not present on your system. For regular users, there will be multiple fonts to choose from or to select none at all.

At translatewiki.net, we run the latest version of the WebFonts software at all times. This allows you to get familiar with the look and feel and follow its progress. To make it easy for you, we will copy the text of the article on your language from your wiki to the Portal:**/Webfonts page at translatewiki. The fonts that we use are the best Freely Licensed fonts we can find. For the Indic languages this is typically the Lohit font that is used in many Linux distributions.

The agenda of the localisation team is that WebFonts will go live on Monday December 12. At the India hackathon we learned about issues with some of the fonts and several issues we were able to resolve and others resulted in the filing of bugs at Red Hat. We are looking into having a triage meeting with Red Hat engineers to assess and address any and all issues.

When there are real issues that prevent the reading of the text, we may consider to postpone the WebFonts implementation for a particular language. We are open to technical solutions that improve the usability or acceptance. Apart from that, Wikipedia exist to bring information to everybody and WebFonts allows us to increase out audience.

We urge you to become part of the language support team for your language; language support teams are what we need because we cannot and do not know all the technical details of each language. Thanks, Gmeijssen (ମୋ ଆଲୋଚନା) ୦୫:୩୧, ୨୫ ନଭେମ୍ବର ୨୦୧୧ (UTC)