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Burmese language name is not shown in the interlanguage links list in IE
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Description

In IE8 and IE9 on Windows 7 the name of the Burmese language (code my) is shown as squares in the interlanguage links list. The actual Burmese Wikipedia does seem to work in the same browser, so i have a font installed, but in the links list the link is not seen, so the reader has to guess that that is the language.

This does work correctly in Firefox on the same computer. I opened articles with a lot of interlanguage links, like [[True Jesus Church]] :), and i didn't see any other language that is affected by this problem, but i use Internet Explorer very rarely, so it's possible that there are others.

This may be Microsoft's fault, but if there's anything that MW developers can do to fix it, it would be nice. Maybe explicitly specifying a font will correct this.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz28753
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Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 11:29 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz28753.

Its Microsoft's fault :P

When firefox sees a character that doesn't exist in the current font, it tries every font it has until it finds one that works. When IE sees a character that doesn't exist in the current font, it sits down and cries.

Explicitly specifying a font that has that character would fix the issue though.

Giving this to Alolita as she is most likely to know who should/could apply the font-specification.

Created attachment 8541
IE9 screenshot. "my" language name highlighted

Added IE9 screenshot with "my" autonym highlighted. I confirm the observation that after adding the font that is advertised on the main page of http://my.wikipedia.org the interwiki link is not being diplayed in a readable format. Blocks are still being displayed, while text in my.wp is now displayed in characters instead of blocks. I have also tested on Firefox 4 in OSX with the same font, and there everything worked as expected; both interwiki link description as well as my.wp content were displayed in characters instead of blocks.

Feels very much like a browser issue, and not as a MediaWiki issue.

Attached:

Schermafbeelding_2011-05-17_om_01.50.32.png (393×535 px, 53 KB)

Yes, it is a browser issue, but see the description: MW developers can work around it by specifying font-family explicitly for this language.

A solution that will be even better, though slightly harder to implement, would be to specify a webfont for every language based on the lang attribute. But until this is implemented (and it should be!) font-family must be explicitly specified for the interlanguage links to Burmese.

Is this solved now by WebFonts/ULS?

Amir: Do you know if this is solved by WebFonts/ULS?

Amir: Do you know if this is solved by WebFonts/ULS?

(Sorry about the delay - for some reason I didn't receive emails about this bug.)

It is solved by Webfonts or ULS on wikis where Webfonts or ULS are installed. That means - not on the English Wikipedia, for example.