Topic on User talk:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)

Hello Lydia. I noticed that you are answeing questions about the query builder tool, so I thought I'd try my luck here with a question that may be somewhat tangential.

I am am a bureaucrat on mk.wiki, and we have been trying to find a way to introduce the proper rendition for italics/cursive for Macedonian (and Serbian). These are quite different from the default ones given by Unicode, which are based on the East Slavic Cyrillic orthography (see the differences here). This is a persistent problem for decades and, while we cannot solve it everywhere, we would be very glad to have the letters render correctly on mk.wiki (and sr.wiki, if they are interested).

Here is a saved thread with Wikimedia/MediaWiki people (all messages in the thread are given at the bottom of the page, one by one). We were told that this can be done, but that we should find a suitable free font, which we were unable to do.

Few years on, I see that the Query Builder tool, as it shows in Macedonian renders the hint bubbles in the correct way (i.e. if you hover over the circled i). I was wondering if you could somehow point me to the source place for that font, which obviously exists freely and can be implemented here (the guys in the thread insisted on a free font, and I believe that this one is free), so that we may contact them again and have the correct rendition implemented. Our community will be thrilled. Many thanks!

P.S. In the differences page (as above), they show some code for correct rendition, but this doesn't work on our wiki, and the whole point is to have it as a default rendition everywhere on the wiki. Maybe that font is already installed on en.wiki, and we can just take from there and implement it for our wiki? If so, how do we go about doing it? I am asking this in case I am right in this assumption. Otherwise, the issue presented above still stands to be resolved. I've asked the users from the above linked thread to chip in here, if they can.

Hi @Bjankuloski06,

Our designers say:

• The fonts in QB are defined by our design system tokens that ultimately use values from Wikimedia-ui-base. What you are seeing applied is "-apple-system, 'BlinkMacSystemFont', 'Segoe UI', 'Roboto', 'Lato', 'Helvetica', 'Arial', sans-serif;" or "@font-family-system-sans"
• You should check out these fonts, respectively the free ones, 'Roboto' and 'Lato' and see if they do what is needed.

I hope this helps!

Hello again Lydia. I was going to ask how we should go about implementing this on our wiki, beucase there is none of us who knows where to start. Would you by chance know whom we should ask to do it for us? I would assume that it's system thing beyond our ability to introduce. It is important to apply this form of italics to the whole wiki by default, whenever italics are used. Any ideas who can install that?

I unfortunately don't know. I would continue talking to the language engineering team you already talked to. They are the most likely to be able to help. I hope you can get this solved and sorry I can't be of more help here!

Thanks a lot for that. I was recommended to talk to Amir Aharoni about it, which is right considering that he is the expert in these matters.