Hi, So, since there are a lot of discussions about typography lately, I guess I have to chime in with internationalization considerations.
tl;dr: 1. Bug 57045 should be resolved. 2. Typography changes shouldn't be made default in any language without testing and positive approval. The long version: The discussions about typography need to take into account not just the Latin alphabet, but other alphabets as well. Even within the Latin alphabet there can be variations; for example, Vietnamese and some other languages use a very large number of đìâċṛįṭīçś, which may require use of different styles. Generally, *any* significant typography changes must be tested in all scripts and nothing should be enabled by default in any project without a positive approval from the community or at least from Language Engineering. This is not as heavy and bureaucratic as it sounds, however :) What do I mean by "all scripts"? Basically scripts like "Latin", "Cyrillic", "Devanagari", etc. Their number is much smaller than the ~300 languages of MediaWiki. An easy step to properly creating these groups would be resolving bug 57045 [1], where I propose grouping languages by script names. And here are some actual basic style considerations: * minimum line-height: usually not important for Latin, but often needed for languages of South and South-East Asia. * minimum letter size: languages with complex glyphs and ligatures are usually completely unreadable under 12, and may even need a size of over 14. Examples are Chinese, and many languages of India. * underline: underline is quite bad for writing systems where the letters often go below the baseline, such as Arabic. (This is actually implemented in a very hacky way in getStyles() in includes/resourceloader/ResourceLoaderUserCSSPrefsModule.php and should be refactored.) * uppercase and small caps: this may be useful and nice for Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian, but other writing systems don't have it. Depending on it for adding elegance or for emphasis is not a good idea. These are the basics. Obviously, there may be more considerations. Another relevant link: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Internationalization/Styling_and_typography [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57045 -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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