Last modified: 2013-02-08 12:26:01 UTC
Created attachment 9101 [details] Tahoma, Sans-serif enabled The text on the Arabic Wikipedia, look very small, and is very hard to read, it has been the case since forever. But, if you change the CSS of the font-family to tahoma, sans serif. Like this : font-family: tahoma, sans-serif; The text looks clearer, slightly bigger and easier to read, Attached are examples of what I'm talking about, Thanks in advance,
Created attachment 9102 [details] Disabled
A local sysop can change this on Arabic Wikipedia by editing MediaWiki:Common.css. Or is this something that should be applied to all Arabic text in MediaWiki?
Indeed, all of the Arabic text should be rendered in Tahoma, or if not possible with sans-serif, in case Tahoma isn't in the user's OS.
In the Arabic Wikipedia it is supposed to be sans-serif already. If i understand correctly, you are using Chrome or a similar browser; what OS are you using? I also see that the text is centered, and it is not supposed to be centered by default. Does it look the same in other browsers? Does it look the same if you are browsing anonymously or with a different username?
I'm using Chrome, and running Windows Vista. The best font for Arabic is Tahoma, which is not what the Arabic wikipedia is currently using. Writing font-family: Tahoma, Sans-serif; in a CSS file, will (as you probably know) use Tahoma and Sans-serif as an alternative if Tahoma for some reason couldn't be used. The text is centered because that's the way it is, it has centering tags I guess, it looks centered even in the original screenshot (Disabled). Also, many contributors to the Arabic Wikipedia, are writing in bold characters, sometimes making their text bigger than it should be, just so it can be visible. If we can apply Tahoma by default, it will give the users an appropriate look and feel experience. And then we could probably run a bot later to reset articles to normal instead of bold. And yes, it looks the same whatever I do.
Oh, now i see that on Windows it is indeed serif. (Although not centered - but that's probably a different issue.) We are going to have discussions about fonts this week. I'll keep this issue in mind and raise it there. The treatment of fonts in MediaWiki is probably going to change soon (WebFonts etc.). As Roan said, it is possible to change it locally in MediaWiki:Common.css in the meantime.
The centering is due to tags that are present in the article, the contributors wanted it to be that way, it's not an issue. Also, I have no contact with local sysops, their IRC channel is on invite only, but I'll try to contact them by some mean. Thank you !
any update, aharoni?
(In reply to comment #6 by Amir E. Aharoni) > We are going to have discussions about fonts this week. I'll keep this issue in > mind and raise it there. Amir: Any news?
(In reply to comment #6) > Oh, now i see that on Windows it is indeed serif. (Although not centered - but > that's probably a different issue.) > > We are going to have discussions about fonts this week. I'll keep this issue in > mind and raise it there. The treatment of fonts in MediaWiki is probably going > to change soon (WebFonts etc.). As Roan said, it is possible to change it > locally in MediaWiki:Common.css in the meantime. Any news about this ?
Amir: Could you answer comment 9 and 10 please?
Oh, sorry, this fell off my radar somehow. The Arabic Wikipedia now uses the Amiri webfont, and AFAIK people are happy about it. So does this still need fixing?
Taha: Could you answer comment 12, please?
Yes indeed. I think it's fixed.
