From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Oct 31 2006 - 06:19:50 CST
Note that I am not the author of the Wikipedia.fr CSS stylesheets. I know that the default ones foce some fonts that don't work as expected (at least with Internet Explorer), which prevent using the fonts selected by the user in the browser. That's why i was fuiguring out a way to configure my own Monobook.css file in my Wikipedia user account, to override the default Monobook.css proposed by Wikipedia.fr.
another way would be to use a user's custom Monobook.js javascript, to remove some CSS rules from the default Monobook.css proposed by wikipedia.fr.
The same problem also occurs in stylesheets proposed in other editions of Wikipedia (including English).
And it's really difficult to setup a working CSS stylesheet that covers many scripts as it depends on:
* system type and version
* installed fonts and version.
* browser type and version
Just sniffing the browser does not help much.
I am interested to hear here how you can setup a working multilanguage stylesheet without having to markup every text with its intended script, so that the script type can become a style selector in CSS for specifing different sets of fonts.
The current solutions documented on wikipediasimply don't work as indicated: having the fonts installed, and a system prepared to support the scripts is not enough to solve the display problem, just because of the default Monobook.css stylesheets that are preloaded on Wikipedia and that already override almost all fonts settings preset in the browser or in user preferences in the browser (this is true for both IE and Firefox).
For this reason, the only way to solve the problem for now on wikipedia is to add specific "font-family:" CSS style within the markup of the page, and I think that this solution is horrible (because it will have to be repeated on every cell of tables, and in almost all paragraphs to override the monobook.css settings); Unfortunately, we still can't specify an embedded CSS stylesheet in Wikipedia articles, or to reference an external CSS stylesheet stored in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia still does not like the <style> element and silentely removes it from the rendered page, for security, instead of just filtering the possible active javascript properties that may be inserted there. Custom Javascript and CSS is only allowed in the user's own Monobook.js, but it cannot be referenced directly or used by anyone else than the connected user account owner (so each user attempting to use the same scripts or stylesheet have to copy/paste it in their own custom script or stylesheet).
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Kass" <thunder-bird@earthlink.net>
To: "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>; <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2006 4:09 AM
Subject: Re: Test your web browser! Unicode 5.0 charts in HTML on French Wikipedia
>
> Philippe Verdy wrote,
>
>> You're wrong. The article names use the capital on Unicode. Look
>> at the effective title displayed after you link there.
>>
>> What I forgot is the "wiki/" part in the full URL.
>
> O.K..
>
>> But even then, Wikipedia
>> proposes you the correct name and redirects you immediately to
>> the articles (so even these links DO work).
>
> Earlier I only read the 404 file not found error message. But, I see
> that Wikipedia does propose the correct link. However, on my system
> the automatic redirection to the correct link does not work, even after
> waiting a full minute. Maybe my browser security settings forbid
> such redirection.
>
> Unfortunately, many of the charts display with "missing glyph" boxes,
> even though I have fonts installed and the browser properly configured
> to display these characters. This seems to happen mostly in the Latin/
> Greek/Cyrillic ranges. What might be happening is that the author,
> in the CSS sheet, has specified a list of fonts beginning with "Arial Unicode MS".
>
> When MSIE 6.0 finds a page linked to a style sheet such as this, it first looks
> for "Arial Unicode MS". If the browser does not find "Arial Unicode MS", it
> is very happy to display the missing glyph boxes from regular "Arial" and
> disregards the rest of the font suggestion list.
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