The Mongolian script needs extra CSS to display properly. This has resulted in lots of wikis having templates for applying styles to text in Mongolian script, such as Template:MongolUnicode, Template:MongolUnicode-div and Template:ManchuSibeUnicode.
MediaWiki should include styles for Mongolian script so that appropriate styles can be easily applied to words in Mongolian script in a MediaWiki installation, such as
- by anyone editing wikitext, without needing to first create templates like these
- by extensions which are not working with wikitext (e.g. Wikibase, ULS)
Some of the issues:
- The Mongolian script is written vertically and needs writing-mode: vertical-lr, and sometimes also display: inline-block.
- When embedded in horizontal text, there needs to be a limit on the height to avoid large gaps between the horizontal lines.
- A font needs to be set so that shaping rules work properly (Chrome can't do shaping across font boundaries, which causes problems with characters like the narrow non-breaking space used to attach suffixes to words).
- Text in Mongolian script normally needs a larger font size and smaller line height than Latin script.
- Mongolian and Manchu/Sibe have different sets of letters and most fonts for Mongolian script don't include both.
- There are almost no freely licensed fonts for Mongolian script and the ones which do exist are bad, incomplete or unsuitable.
- The alignment often needs to be adjusted using vertical-align or text-align.
