Editing MycoTaxa:Village pump (technical)/Archive 1 (section)

== Displaying some of the more exotic languages... ==

There are several languages that display only as large blocks (either with some sort of character in it, which is completely repeated over and over and over, or just a blank "this character doesn't exist" block). I know that on at least ''one'' wiki, there were instructions in the sitenotice for how to display the text properly, but there are a slew that don't have such instructions, and I'd like to find out how what fonts I need to install so that I can view the language properly.

For those that are curious, here's what I'm talking about:
* [[:bn:|Bengali]]
* [[:bpy:|Bishnupriya Manipuri]]
* [[:ka:|Georgian]]
* [[:dv:|Divehi]]
* [[:kn:|Kannada]]
* [[:ml:|Malayalam]]
* [[:arc:|Assyrian Neo-Aramaic]]
* [[:got:|Gothic]]
* [[:km:|Khmer]]
* [[:as:|Assamese]]

And along the lines of what I'm looking for is [[:my:Wikipedia:Font]], which is extremely helpful (though I'd rather ''not'' pay $30 just so I can casually edit in a language) or [[:am:Wikipedia:Can't see the font?]], or the links on [[:lo:|lo.wikipedia]] and [[:ti:|ti.wikipedia]]. [[User:EVula|EVula]] <span style="color: #999;">// [[User talk:EVula|talk]] // [[User:EVula/admin|<span style="color: #366;">&#9775;</span>]] //</span> 16:40, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
:Most of these actually have site notices, but currently, site notices are disabled for all Wikipedias. Kannada Wikipedia has [[:kn:Wikipedia:Kannada Support]], Malayalam Wikipedia has [[:ml:സഹായം:To Read in Malayalam]], Gothic has [[:got:Wikipedia:Gothic Unicode Fonts]]. Bengali has [[:bn:উইকিপেডিয়া:Bangla script display and input help]] (which fixes Assamese as well, and probably Bishnupriya Manipuri). Dhivehi has [[:dv:Tāna_Support]] (not very useful though). Khmer has [[:km:Install Khmer Unicode fonts]]. For all the others, no font help seems to exist, however you could use Google to try to find fonts yourself. -- [[User:Prince Kassad|Prince Kassad]] 05:09, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

::I know this is a terrible answer, but newer operating systems are coming with more and more Unicode support right out of the box. For example, Windows Vista comes with many international fonts for many languages: [http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/vista/Vista_Language_Support.mspx]. So, the problem will slowly resolve itself in time as people transition to newer software.

::That said, a page that listed Unicode character sets with links to free fonts to that can display them would be nice. —[[User:Remember the dot|Remember the dot]] <sup>([[User talk:Remember the dot|talk]])</sup> 05:37, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

:::@Prince Kassad: I had no idea that the site notices were disabled. How come? That would certainly explain my confusion over how I could have sworn I'd seen some before... thanks for the links, too. I can't check them right now, since I'm a bit busy, but I'll do so when I get home.

:::@Remember the dot: Eh, I wouldn't consider that a terrible answer. I use Mac OSX, which has excellent Unicode support (even as I was compiling the list, I was able to remove a couple of the wikis by finding the fonts and basically just double-clicking them; pretty nice to not have to restart the browser to see the characters). That said, I'd be surprised if I installed *all* the optional languages when I first set up the computer, and I've got no clue where the system DVD is. :D I'm gonna poke around Meta to see if there's a Unicode set list; if not, that seems like the best place for such a list to go. [[User:EVula|EVula]] <span style="color: #999;">// [[User talk:EVula|talk]] // [[User:EVula/admin|<span style="color: #366;">&#9775;</span>]] //</span> 05:53, 22 October 2007 (UTC)