A while back I posted about an interesting experiment on sending fonts over the web as Javascript. Here’s a look at a more robust solution to the same problem: web fonts.

Check out this list of Wikipedias. Do you see a lot of question marks or little meaningless boxes? The reason you get that junk is that you don’t happen to have the right fonts installed locally on your computer.

That sucks. It’s not fair. Why should English or French or Russian or Japanese speakers be treated as first-class citizens of the web, but Tibetan or Khmer or Inuktitut speakers be treated as weirdos?

When “web fonts” catch on, this regrettable state of affairs could start to fade away. Content providers will be able to host fonts on the server, right next to the content requiring those fonts, thus ensuring that readers will be able to see content in any language.

John Resig has an article that explains how all this works: An introduction to W3C Web Fonts. Happily, as John points out, it seems that browser support for web fonts is on the upswing.

I’m convinced that a lack of fonts is a major barrier to an increase in the amount of content in certain languages on the web. Web fonts would go a long way toward fulfilling the “world wide” promise of the World Wide Web.

I ran across this on the Wikipedia mailing list and thought I’d repost it for my fellow language nerds:

We’re working on an update to the Wikipedia logo, which can be used in 3-D, which will be correcting all the incorrect glyphs, and include
many other scripts that are not presently in the logo.

The project page is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Logo and we’re still looking for community members to discuss, to help sort
out characters, font styles and representations for the additional
alphabets as well as continue discussing the current glyphs on the
talk page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikipedia/Logo.

Your input is greatly appreciated!

That post was from Cary Bass.

The project page has a nifty diagram of the work in progress (where you can see the borked up Katakana on the current logo, can’t believe I’d never noticed that before…):

We’re going to go out on a limb here, and call it for Spanish:

   1 cs
   1 el
   1 nl
   1 no
   1 sv
   1 th
   1 zh
   3 ro
   6 it
  13 de
  15 fr
  23 pt
  26 es

http://twitter.com/drturnuseverin/status/990376485
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• Reappreciating Okinawa’s languages, while there’s still time | The Japan Times Online Japan is a linguistically complex place; this article has a few examples (with transcriptions in Japanese) of some of the several Ryukyuan languages.
• Sign of the times - we’re turning into robots | Libby Purves - Times Online An op-ed about that wacky Welsh traffic sign. What is the solution to these problems? Surely, some enterprising person could come up with a web-based vetting system (or at least a sanity-checking system) for materials like this?
• Wanted: Foreign language skills - Business - Starbulletin.com A look at the current economics of translation and interpretation in Hawaii.

As a famous pig once put it, “That’ll do.”

That for Halloween I was U+0310, U+0304, U+0302, U+0303, U+030A, U+0E44, and U+0940.

That is all.

Well heck, here’s one more horrifyingly Halloweeny language-related tale:

BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | E-mail error ends up on road sign

The English is clear enough to lorry drivers - but the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Because, why not?

And Irish orthography is scary (it makes Welsh look like Rotokas), so it’s a good Halloween song!

See if you can follow along:

An Dragún - The Guggenheim Grotto

Tá bua ag mo dheartháir…músclaíonn sé ina bhrionglóidí
Agus is leat an uile… má dhúisíonn tú id’ bhrionglóidí
Labhairt le sioraf agus síneadh deich dtroithe
Le haon chéim amháin gearr an chruinne ‘na leath
Sea, is leat an uile má dhúisíonn tú id’ bhrionglóidí
Chas sé le dragún…d’eitil siad thuas ins an spéir
Bhí bruscar i ngach áit…bhí gach áit faoi smál ins an aeir
Só chuaigh siad chuig seomra a’bhí fairsing is bán
D’fhan siad gur oscail an doras go lán
Shiúil m’athair ’steach…’s rin’ siad dá chéile ceann croí

Happy Halloween, Kids!

For many languages, font support is a deal killer.

If you’re a user and your language has a non-Roman script, say, and if that script is relatively unusual, such as Bengali or Georgian or Tigrinya or something like that, and you waltz into a cyber cafe that doesn’t happen to be in a place where your language is on the agenda, then you’re pretty much out of luck.

It’s my contention that people who happen to use a language which is written in a broadly supported script simply have no idea of how frustrating and oppressive such a state of affairs is.

Imagine not being able to sign your name in an email!

Things are improving, but not fast enough. Interesting ideas come and go, and here’s one that’s just appeared:

With typeface.js you can embed custom fonts in your web pages so you don’t have to render text to images.
typeface.js is easy…
Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally. This is a work in progress, but functional enough at least to render the the graphic text on this site.

typeface.js — Rendering text with Javascript, canvas, and VML

The idea may seem a bit nutty, but it’s not, really. After all, a font file is ultimately just some code anyway. So one could imagine finding some representative free fonts for each of the writing systems out in the world, and distributing freely so that content creators could publish away in Bengali or Georgian or Tigrinya or whatever.

Except, not really. The problem is that this thing seems to be designed more for folks who want to have nice fonts in headings and blow-up quotes than in running text. The deal killer for me: cut and paste doesn’t work. So, it may as well be an image.

The real solution is free (libre) fonts for every writing system, widely distributed across operating systems, and also available as embedded fonts. Neither of those approaches is new, but that’s what it’s going to take, I think, to really make the web egalitarian.

UPDATE: Should have checked with Richard Ishida’s site first: he’s got some links to collections of free fonts via his page on Script examples.

• Gallery of Unicode Fonts
• Unicode fonts for Windows computers - Page 1

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am heavily annoyed by the fact that translators don’t get credited for their work more often. But once in a while… Hey look!

Stanisław Lem’s Unpublished Works Discovered

Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak

*raises glass to Marcin*

The translator byline comes after the article, but hey, at least it’s there.

I’m inferring (with zero knowledge of Polish) that the same paper is the source of the Polish original, because it says Źródło: Gazeta Wyborcza, and Wikipedia tells me that Źródło means something like source. But weirdly, the Polish original doesn’t seem to be on wyborcza.pl: a search for “Stanisław” on wyborcza.pl gets some hits, but after trudging through them and comparing “by eye,” none of them seems to be the same article.

Maybe the Polish article is only in the print version; maybe they assumed that because Lem is such an international figure it would make sense to publish the story online in English… who knows?

Any Polish speakers out there who can find the original?

UPDATE: Ewa found the original: Odkryto niepublikowane utwory Stanisława Lema!. I was searching for Stanisław, but only inflected forms of the name, such as Stanisława, appear in the article. D’oh. Thanks Ewa!

Here’s a worthy project to muse over for your Friday morning:

The folks at the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary, aka The Kamusi Project, have started a project to build 100 locales for African languages:

100 African Language Locales | The Kamusi Project.

The project is being hosted at a (lovely) site called ANLoc, The African Network for Localisation.

There’s a slideshow about the project at 100 African Language Locales.

I’m happy to see that they’re planning to incorporate their work into the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), which really seems to be catching on. (A very good thing!)