Help:Multilingual support

Articles on the English WikiQueer may contain words or texts written in different languages and scripts. To be able to correctly view and edit these articles requires that you have the appropriate fonts installed and to have correctly configured your operating system and browser. This guide will help you to do so.

Unicode
Articles on WikiQueer are encoded using Unicode (specifically UTF-8), an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. Because UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII, and most modern browsers have at least basic Unicode support, most users will experience little difficulty reading and editing WikiQueer.

For older browsers, MediaWiki, the WikiQueer software, serves the wikitext in a safe mode upon editing. Characters that cannot be represented in ASCII are temporarily converted to hexadecimal character references, looking like &amp;#x1234;. Existing hexadecimal character references get an additional leading zero so they are not converted to actual characters when the page is saved, and look like &amp;#x01234;. Likewise, to create a hexadecimal character reference in safe mode, not the character itself, a leading zero should be added. One can check whether safe mode is used by editing this section. If &#x4D; looks like &amp;#x04D; rather than &amp;#x4D;, safe mode is used.

Font
Most computers with Microsoft Windows, Apple's OS X and many Linux variants will already have fonts with support for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the International Phonetic Alphabet installed. Many mobile devices, such as the iPhone and iPad also include such fonts. Several historic and accented characters (used in the transliteration of foreign scripts) may be missing, though.

Microsoft fonts include:

Browsers

 * Internet Explorer: supports Latin (however not all extended sets), Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew. Support for East Asian and some Indic scripts is available if support for this has been installed for Windows. As Internet Explorer will only use the default font for other scripts, those are usually not supported (unless the default font does).
 * Firefox: tries to render any character using all the fonts available on the system so multilingual support is generally good. The default rendering engine does not support complex script rendering, however. Some Linux distributions ship with a Pango-based rendering engine which does, this may currently cause some display glitches with justified text, though.
 * Opera: tries to render any character using all the fonts available on the system so multilingual support is also good. Opera uses the operating system to perform contextual glyph selection, ligature forming, character stacking, combining character support and other character shaping tasks.
 * Chrome: Does not support the languages of India, but otherwise renders many characters. Renders Sinhala, Gurmukhi, and Tibetan scripts in the examples below, but not Devanagari (used for Hindi), Bengali, or any of the other official languages of India.

Avestan

 * Ahuramazda

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are an abugida used to write a number of First Nations languages in Canada, including Cree, Ojibwe, Naskapi, Inuktitut, Blackfoot, Sayisi, and Carrier.


 * Aboriginal Sans (Unicode), from LanguageGeek
 * Also supported by the Code2000 family of fonts. (See above)

Cherokee

 * Digohweli, from LanguageGeek

Coptic
The Coptic alphabet is used to write Coptic, the language used in Egypt before Arabic. It is currently used solely as a liturgical language.


 * Quivira: Use this for the best Coptic letter/ word spacing and sizing. It provides full Unicode support for all Coptic letters.
 * GNU FreeSerif
 * Antinoou is a new Sahidic Coptic unicode font, which will probably become standard for Sahidic.
 * Alphabetum is a commercial unicode font, but it is the only font that provides Bohairic Coptic letters rather than Sahidic.

Deseret

 * Serif fonts
 * Sans Serif fonts

Ethiopic
The Ethiopic syllabary is used in central east Africa for Amharic, Bilen, Oromo, Tigré, Tigrinya, and other languages. It evolved from the script for classical Ge'ez, which is now strictly a liturgical language.

Indic
The following table compares how a correctly enabled computer would render the following scripts with how your computer renders them:

Old Persian cuneiform
The Old Persian cuneiform script was used to write the Old Persian language. The script is encoded in block "Old Persian", code points 103A0–103DF (Unicode.org chart). It is supported by the following fonts:
 * Asea (free font)

Syriac/Aramaic script
Syriac and Aramaic scripts like most Semitic scripts flow from right-to-left which can cause letter to appear in the wrong order. The tag rtl-lang can be used to fix this issue.


 * Aramaic Fonts A large selection of free Aramaic TrueType fonts.
 * Meltho OpenType™ Syriac Fonts (free font).

Most operating system provide support for Syriac script natively, however only the Madnḥāyā variety is rendered correctly. In order to render the Serṭā and Estrangelo  varieties, additional fonts are needed. This is supported by the following fonts:

Tifinagh script
See Help:Multilingual_support_%28Tifinagh%29

Balinese
The Balinese script is used to write the Balinese language. The script is encoded in block "Balinese", code points 1B00–1B7F (Unicode.org chart). It is supported by the following fonts:
 * Aksara Bali (free OpenType font with keyboard driver)

Burmese

 * Available fonts

Javanese
Javanese script is used to write Javanese language. It has been supported by Unicode 5.2 above. To install the unicode characters for Javanese, simply go to Jawa Unicode. The font provided at Jawa Unicode is SIL graphite font, which is best viewed with Mozilla Firefox browser (version 11+) or other Gecko based browser (such as Palemoon), and best used used for typing at OpenOffice.org softwares. For the TrueType Javanese font, you can try Jason Glavy's JG Aksara Jawa, but JG font creates rendering problem for and  fonts because it was created pre Javanese Unicode and using codepoints from Limbu (1900-194F), Tai Le (1950-197F), New Tai Lu (1980-19DF), Khmer Symbols (19E0-19FF), Bugis/Lontara (1A00-1A1F), Tai Tham (1A20-1AAD), Bali (1B00-1B7F), and Sunda (1B80-1BBF). Adjisaka uses Javanese codepoints, but not all. (see jv:Pitulung:Aksara Jawa)

There's a manual on Javanese WikiQueer about this.

Lontara
The Lontara script is used to write the Buginese, Makassarese, and Mandar language. The script is encoded in block "Buginese", code points 1A00–1A1F (Unicode.org chart). It is supported by the following fonts:
 * Saweri
 * Code2000
 * MPH 2B Damase

Old Tagalog/Baybayin
Baybayin (also known as the Tagalog script in Unicode and Alibata) is a form of pre-Spanish Philippine writing system in which modern minority scripts in the Philippines has descended.

Download and installation:
 * Paul Morrow's Baybayin Fonts. Offers the most extensive list of Baybayin fonts for Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
 * PNKL is a free unicode font support which defines own assignment of Baybayin alphabet to a normal keyboard. Available for Windows and Linux users.

Sundanese
The Sundanese script is used to write the Sundanese language. The script is encoded in block "Sundanese", code points 1B80–1BBF (Unicode.org chart). It is supported by the following fonts:
 * Sundanese Unicode (direct download link) (free font)

Esperanto
Mediawiki installations configured for Esperanto use UTF-8 for storage and display. However when editing the text is converted to a form that is designed to be easier to edit with a standard keyboard.

The characters for which this applies are: Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. you may enter these directly in the edit box if you have the facilities to do so. However when you edit the page again you will see them encoded as Sx. This form is referred to as "x-sistemo" or "x-kodo". In order to preserve round trip capability when one or more x's follow these characters or their non-accented forms (C, G, H, J, S, U, c, g, h, j, s, u), the number of x's in the edit box is double the number in the actual stored article text.

For example, the interlanguage link Luxury car to en:Luxury car has to be entered in the edit box as Luxxury car on eo:. This has caused problems with interwiki update bots in the past.

Romanian
The Romanian alphabet contains an S-comma (Ș ș) and T-comma (Ț ț). These characters were added to Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian standardization institute. As font support for these characters has been poor in the past, many computer users use the similar characters S-cedilla (Ş ş) and T-cedilla (Ţ ţ) instead. However, on WikiQueer it is recommended to use the correct characters with comma below.