Languages am and ti has AbyssinicaSIL(http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=abyssinicasil) as the webfonts from 2011-05-18. This font is embedded in the wiki pages. When a user first time visit a page, and not having this font installed locally, browser will download it only once, you will see a flash in the screen because of re-rendering(noticeable depending on bandwidth and system speed etc).

I cannot judge the quality of the font, but if this default preference does not match with your preference you may change it as explained here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector

We try to use a good quality free licensed font, if you happen to know alternate font better that this font, please discuss with ti wiki community and let us know.

incarus6 wrote:

(In reply to comment #1)

Languages am and ti has
AbyssinicaSIL(http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.
php?site_id=nrsi&id=abyssinicasil)
as the webfonts from 2011-05-18. This font is embedded in the wiki pages.
When
a user first time visit a page, and not having this font installed locally,
browser will download it only once, you will see a flash in the screen
because
of re-rendering(noticeable depending on bandwidth and system speed etc).

I cannot judge the quality of the font, but if this default preference does
not
match with your preference you may change it as explained here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector

We try to use a good quality free licensed font, if you happen to know
alternate font better that this font, please discuss with ti wiki community
and
let us know.

That can't be the whole answer. Look how the font in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea is different than in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea , in the english article this issue does not occure.

(In reply to comment #2)

That can't be the whole answer. Look how the font in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea is different than in
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea , in the english article this issue
does
not occure.

In my machine, I see squares for Ethiopic script in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea(because that text is not marked with lang attribute, so no webfont applies). In https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea I see text using AbyssinicaSIL. Better than squares. But like I said, I don't know the script and language, so I don't have better answer here. You may have a better locally installed font.

Created attachment 13326
Screenshot

Is this the same problem that can be seen in the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph#Arabic_variants (reported in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=573623991#Arabic_fonts ) or should that be a separate report? The arabic characters are bigger than the table cells, in Firefox 23 and Google Chrome 29.

Attached:

incarus6 wrote:

(In reply to comment #4)

Is this the same problem that can be seen in the table at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph#Arabic_variants (reported in
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:
Village_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=573623991#Arabic_fonts
) or should that be a separate report? The arabic characters are bigger than
the table cells, in Firefox 23 and Google Chrome 29.

Not really, but it might be all related to the font file.

This shouldn't happen any longer for two reasons:

1. If you have a local Ethiopic font on your machine, it should be used by default and not replaced with a web font, because we added a "tofu detection" feature (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/WebFonts ). For users who don't have any Ethiopic on their machines, an ugly font is better than squares. According to our metrics (I'll publish precise numbers next week) Ethiopic fonts are among the least commonly supported.

2. At this point Webfonts are disabled by default, so this shouldn't happen in any language unless you enable it from the gear icon. They maybe re-enabled by default in the future.

Also, I studied this script and I believe that the Abyssinica font is very good, but that's a matter for separate discussion.

And as for untranslated messages appearing with an "ugly" English font - the best solution for that is to translate them, but tofu detection prevents that anyway.

So this is basically a WONTFIX, because the problems are supposed to be addressed. If something happens that still bothers you, please reopen with an explanation.

incarus6 wrote:

I can not further reconstruct the mentioned behaviour so the bug seems to be fixed. I can not tell if this is due to changes in Wikipedia, my web browser or my installed fonts.

[resetting to Amir's bug resolution WONTFIX]