Hi,

There was no significant change in Malayalam language support since 2013 in
operating systems. Last OS which has incomplete Malayalam support was
Windows XP (without any service package), so it is irrelevant. There was no
prior notification about this removal. Malayalam webfonts were simply
unilaterally removed from Malayalam projects (just like it's deployment).
We Malayalam wikimedians like to know the substantial changes in
circumstances which lead to removal of Malayalam fonts from ULS. Please
also note that so many other languages which are much bigger in number of
speakers and well supported in OSs even before Malayalam, are still serving
webfonts in ULS (eg: Arabic, Tamil, Kannada etc).

There was occasion when a webfont imposed (maintained upstream by ULS
developer) on  Malayalam community. User community members were asked
consensus for each and every word about this imposed webfont font. Once
Wikipedia editing was entirely impaired for weeks by removing typing tool
(ULS removed by misreading the bug) after these 'skirmishes'. Users were
abused and even humiliated based on their tribe by 'sidekicks' in public
mailing lists and forums. As a small community who lost a significant
number of users and thus growth, because of the problems in the deployment
of webfonts and antipathy, we believe we have the right to know the
circumstance/study/reason about this removal.

Related links:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rEULS28c0ba6bca63e658160f772cdef141c2b9298a83
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T53019
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T51894

The fullfilled request for webfonts as an optional feature asked after
community consensus, also broken here.

---
ml:User:Praveenp
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