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Include more Tamil webfonts
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Description

Tamil Fonts from Thamizha -- ttf,eot,woff files

I have generated Webfont files(ttf,eot,woff) for 4 Free fonts listed by "Thamizha" community(Free Tamil Computing) group.

https://github.com/thamizha/tamil-fonts/tree/master/umar/ver-1.0-zip

I tried to install WebFonts extension locally and test, but was not able to download due to some locks on SVN

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor?extdist_extension=WebFonts&extdist_version=trunk&extdist_submit=Continue

""svn: Working copy '/mnt/upload6/private/ExtensionDistributor/mw-snapshot/trunk/extensions' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)""

Please let me know if anything more is required to get these additional fonts as part of Webfonts extension. Once the fonts are available, post testing (on translatewiki.net / locally), we might request deployment of Webfonts on Tamil Wikipedia

About the Fonts

https://github.com/thamizha/tamil-fonts

This branch of Tahmizha's github repository for Tamil-Fonts is for the further development and distribution of the 4 Unicode Tamil TTF fonts that were released under GUN/GPL (then version 2) in 2003-2004 by the late Umar Thamby via the site http://www.geocities.com/csd_one/fonts/ . That geocities distribution sight (which had been under yahoo.com) is no longer available.

The four fonts are as follows:

ThendralUni
TheneeUni
TheneeUniTx
VaigaiUni

The Thamizha group (http://thamizha.com) feels honoured in continuing the works initiated by the late Umar Thamby whose contributions towards development of free and open source softwares for Tamil use in computers are invaluable. And these our efforts are dedicated to late Umar Thamby.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Attached:

Details

Reference
bz31889

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 11:50 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz31889.

I have added Thendral, Thenee and Vaigai fonts in r100580
I did not add TheneeUniTx since I found it as same as TheneeUniTx , but with Tamil glyphs mapped to latin code poiints(ASCII Font).
Vaigai seems to be a Calligraphy font , normally used for writing for posters and all, may not be good for normal content like wiki articles. I might be wrong, but let me know.

I would also like to know which font Tamil community prefer as default font.

Thanks, will update the default font preferred by community here after seeing results out on translatewiki.

On a related note, wanted to know, whats the minimum browser support required for using WebFonts extension. I know most modern browsers (Incl IE 8?) support webfonts, but there are people who still use IE6 out there in Tamil community.

(In reply to comment #2)

On a related note, wanted to know, whats the minimum browser support required
for using WebFonts extension. I know most modern browsers (Incl IE 8?) support
webfonts, but there are people who still use IE6 out there in Tamil community.

EOT format will work in IE6, so no problem.

What's the benefit of adding more fonts here? Are they supposed to be alternate selections for body text, or are they supposed to get mapped to some specific uses? In general simply adding more choices for body text probably isn't a good idea as it complicates things for little clear benefit.

(In reply to comment #4)

What's the benefit of adding more fonts here? Are they supposed to be alternate
selections for body text, or are they supposed to get mapped to some specific
uses? In general simply adding more choices for body text probably isn't a good
idea as it complicates things for little clear benefit.

Each of them mapped to specific users and specific requirements for the language.

Many languages have different fonts to address different writing styles, And there is a preference for certain writing style for users. For example, in Malayalam, there are 2 writing styles, one with vowel signs always forming a single glyph, and one with simplified writing style where vowel signs are always separate glyphs. That is the reason for the UI to allow users to select font according to their writing style. For Hebrew, there are fonts with diacritics marks and without them, and both of them are used according to user preference, Sometimes there are text, that must be shown with a specific font to illustrate something.

Closing the bug since the original request was complete. Seperate bugs will be opened if there is need for more webfonts.