https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56346

--- Comment #41 from Michael Zajac <[email protected]> ---
(In reply to comment #37)

I don’t completely agree with Eduard Brown.

WikiMedia hosts an unusual multilingual range of websites on unusual
multilingual software. Text in some languages appears broken on many computers.
There is nothing wrong with aspiring to fix the breakage when the technology is
available.


> Common sense dictates that users have fonts installed for their native
> languages.

An ideal. The reality is that millions of people cannot install fonts on the
devices they depend on, for many different reasons. Smartphone users? Refugee
immigrants relying on library computers configured in a language they barely
know? They deserve access to information.


> Autonym (which will by definition never be as good as a native font like 
> Arial on Windows)

I don’t understand the logic of this. Arial is hardly a great typeface anyway.


> I'm afraid there is definitely room for improvement right now!

True. I don’t know why this was pushed out without some basic testing on common
platforms. 

Most modern browsers on modern OSes render most language scripts these days. A
simple fix for much of this would be to embrace installed fonts, and push
Autonym to the bottom of a font stack that includes the default sans-serif
fonts on the various platforms. I wonder if, indeed, “font-family: sans-serif,
autonym;” would work to make this font the fallback’s fallback. Ideally, it
should only be rendering text that would show up as tofu. Ideally.

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