Last modified: 2014-03-07 11:44:05 UTC
Hi, Please check the screenshots at http://www.browserstack.com/screenshots/3b00b12cb9e6a604ebc8b227b1f4f1050f412e51 The webfonts are not getting displayed in Samsung Galaxy S II, Motorola Droid, Razr and HTC One X And for the devices that display web fonts, they already can display a system font without any issue. So, there is no use of web font here. If you would like to check a non-web font driven Tamil Unicode site, you can test my blog http://blog.ravidreams.net In iPad 3rd (6.0) and OS X Snow Leopard Safari 5.1, the fonts are getting broken and scrambled. ZERO readability. Please note that they could display system font without any issue. For your info: 1. Older versions of iOS do not support OpenType shaping. The embedded Web font appears to be OpenType and may not contain AAT tables. This is why the Tamil Unicode text appeared broken. 2. In Mac OS X, OpenType support was only added in 10.7 (Lion). This is why the text appeared broken in Snow Leopard as it does not support OpenType. 3. The best way to handle older versions of iOS and Mac OS X is to add AAT tables alongside OpenType tables. 4. Android 4.0.x will support OpenType in the browser. Full system-wide support for Tamil started with 4.1. For versions prior to these, whether you have web font or not is irrelevant. So, the case is: Is the implementation of web fonts really useful for languages like Tamil?
Hi, I would appreciate a better title for this bug. This is not a problem with view devices only as the site http://www.browserstack.com/ allows testing only with few devices. This has to be tested across more devices. Also, I have reported broken fonts in some iOS environments. The larger poing: Is web fonts really useful? Is it displaying Tamil at least in few devices which didn't show before web fonts roll out? I will appreciate examples for this.
Thank you for your involvement and engagement, Ravishankar. Please be aware that Bugzilla is not a platform for essays. It is a nu tracker. On http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug it is described how to report actionable and scoped bugs. Please stay to the point. Do not make the scope of an issue larger, report a new one. I will respond to the issue in a later comment.
(In reply to comment #1) > This is not a problem with view devices only as the site > http://www.browserstack.com/ allows testing only with few devices. If other devices are affected, feel free to name them so they can be tested. > This has to be tested across more devices. Rest assured that constant testing happens, however it's understandable that the developers do not have access to every single existing device out there and hence welcome well-defined and reproducible bug reports about issues in specific situations on specific devices so problems can get fixed. :) > Also, I have reported broken fonts in some iOS environments. That sounds like a different issue - one issue per bug report. For general info, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug . Again, thanks for your feedback and help!
I think that the mentioned mobile platforms have operating system versions that do not support web fonts, so web fonts are not e or ted to work on those platforms. Santhosh, can you confirm this? If so, I don't expect web fonts to ever work on these legacy mobile platforms. More recent mobile operatin systems for smart phones do support web fonts. Reporting upstream would make little sense, as the technology is end of life for the manufacturers. So if all my assumptions are confirmed, this issue can be closed as WONTFIX.
So from a user experience point of view, can anything else be done so that users with such phones can get a "readable" Wikipedia?
If legacy platforms won't support webfonts and recent mobile operating systems support system fonts anyway, what is the point of implementing web fonts against community consensus? I am looking for devices that support web fonts and don't have Tamil as a system font.
(In reply to comment #5) > So from a user experience point of view, can anything else be done so that > users with such phones can get a "readable" Wikipedia? I think that the mobile team may have looked into solution that render server side, and send images to the phones, but that's all I know. Fact is that many scripts other than the Latin script have been poorly supported up to recently, or still are poorly supported. Web fonts makes that a little better on some platforms, but the browsers and operating systems must have the right support (CSS in the browser and rendering for the fonts), to actually make that work. As a lot of phone hardware cannot be updated, what you have is what you will ever get.
Based on the discussion above, I assume that I will get a similar response as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49949#c1 in this thread too :) The whole logic seems like this: If someone is not supporting web fonts, it is the problem of that particular vendor to fix. Wikimedia will continue to deploy web fonts and provide substandard experience for majority of the users who had no problem with system fonts first of all. I leave it to the Wikimedia developers to update the status of this bug as they wish. Thanks for looking in to this.
