>I'm trying to render an image which uses characters from all of the >languages supported by WP. Is there a single font deployed on production >servers that include all scripts?
The Autonym font includes characters for all the languages supported by MediaWiki, but only a small subset: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/AutonymFont Ryan Kaldari On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 7:48 AM, C. Scott Ananian <[email protected]> wrote: > In general, "one font to rule them all" is highly > discouraged/impractical as a means to achieve reasonable results in a > variety of world languages. Indic fonts, for example, typically > contain complex shaping engines in bytecode -- it's just not practical > to try to write one engine for everything. All of the "one font with > wide coverage" attempts that I have seen look okay for Latin > languages, but fail for the rest of the world. > > <rant>...which is typically the opinion inadvertently expressed by > these "characters from every language" projects anyway. Without real > knowledge of the rest of the world's languages and scripts, we get > something that shows that the creator valued the rest of the world > only for "looking exotic", and was not interested in true > understanding.</rant> > > Most modern font systems have a mechanism to merge multiple fonts > under one virtual name as needed in order to get good coverage. So > you don't need to find a find font to rule them all. > --scott > > ps. "Font synthesis" systems actually have a big problem in that parts > of the unicode character space are shared by different languages with > different rules for shaping and ligatures, etc. So you really need to > explicitly annotate the language and then chose a font specific for > that *language*, not rely simply on codepoint. (Unfortunately much of > the "foreign language" content in wikipedia (ie short texts which are > not in the main language of the wiki) is not explicitly annotated with > language information.) > > pps. for those actually interested in getting the details of world > writing systems correct, I could use some help with the new OCG PDF > rendering backend, which just went live in production yesterday. It > uses XeLaTeX, which actually does pay careful attention to Indic > shaping and ligatures, etc, but it is not a "modern system" as > described above in terms of synthesizing coverage from multiple fonts. > Patches would be helpful to make better guesses about the native > language of "foreign language" spans, which would then ensure an > appropriate font was used. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
