Help:Multilingual support
Articles on the English Wikipedia 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.
Overview
Unicode
Articles on Wikipedia are encoded using Unicode (specifically UTF-8)[1], 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 Wikipedia.
For older browsers, MediaWiki, the Wikipedia 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 ሴ. 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 ሴ. 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 M looks like M rather than M, safe mode is used.
Font
Most computers with Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office will already have several fonts with support for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the International Phonetic Alphabet installed. Several historic and accented characters (used in the transliteration of foreign scripts) are missing, though.
| Font | Product | Scripts |
|---|---|---|
| Arial Unicode MS [1] |
|
|
| Lucida Sans Unicode [2] | ||
| Tahoma [3] | ||
| Microsoft Sans Serif [4] |
- Arial Unicode MS
- supports a wide number of scripts, but is of a slightly lower quality than Arial because it lacks kerning and is not smoothed. It contains a small bug which causes double-wide diacritics to be placed on the wrong characters.
- Lucida Sans Unicode
- has a slightly smaller character repertoire than that of Arial Unicode MS, but is more legible.
- Tahoma
- has a slightly smaller character repertoire than that of Arial Unicode MS, but is more legible.
- Microsoft Sans Serif
- has better support for historical and accented Latin characters. (Note that this is a different font than MS Sans Serif, a bitmapped font that shipped with older versions of Windows.)
Other available unicode fonts
| Font | Typeface | Sample | License | Format | Encoding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code2000 1.16 | sans-serif | Shareware | TrueType | Unicode | |
| Everson Mono 3.2b4 | monospace | Shareware | TrueType | Unicode | |
| TITUS Cyberbit Basic | serif | Non-commercial | Unicode 4.0 |
| Font | Sample | License | Format | Encoding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DejaVu | ||||
| FreeFonts |
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 distribution ship with a Pango-based rendering engine which does, this may currently cause some display glitches with justified text, though.
Scripts
East Asian
| Script | Correct rendering | Your computer |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 
|
人人生來自由， |
| Simplified Chinese | 
|
人人生来自由， |
| Japanese | 
|
すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、 |
| Korean | File:Koreantesttext.png |
모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 |
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.
| Font | Sample | License | Format | Encoding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abyssinica SIL | OFL | OpenType, AAT and Graphite | Unicode 4.1 + SIL PUA | |
| Code2000 1.16 | Shareware | TrueType | Unicode | |
| Ethiopia Jiret | GPL2 | Unicode 3.0 | ||
| Everson Mono | Shareware | TrueType | Unicode | |
| GF Zemen Unicode | GPL2 | TrueType | Unicode | |
| TITUS Cyberbit | Non-commercial | Unicode 4.0 |
External links
Indic
The following table compares how a correctly enabled computer would render the following scripts with how your computer renders them:
| Script | Correct rendering | Your computer |
|---|---|---|
| Bengali | 
|
ক + ি → কি |
| Devanāgarī | 
|
क + ि → कि |
| Gujarati | 
|
ક + િ → કિ |
| Gurmukhī | 
|
ਕ + ਿ → ਕਿ |
| Kannada | 
|
ಕ + ಿ → ಕಿ |
| Malayalam | 
|
ക + െ → കെ |
| Oriya | 
|
କ + େ → କେ |
| Tibetan | 
|
ར + ྐ + ྱ → རྐྱ |
| Tamil | 
|
க + ே → கே |
| Telugu | 
|
య + ీ → యీ |
Myanmar
Fonts
| Font | License | Unicode | OpenType | AAT | Graphite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MyaZedi | |||||
| WinSystems | |||||
| MPH Yangon | |||||
| UniBurma | |||||
| Padauk | |||||
| ZawGyi |
Special cases
Esperanto
| in edit box | in database and output |
|---|---|
| S | S |
| Sx | Ŝ |
| Sxx | Sx |
| Sxxx | Ŝx |
| Sxxxx | Sxx |
| Sxxxxx | Ŝxx |
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 (A, 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 [[en:Luxury car]] to en:Luxury car has to be entered in the edit box as [[en:Luxxury car]] on eo:. This has caused problems with interwiki update bots in the past.
Romanian
The Romanian alphabet contain an S-comma (Ș ș) and T-comma (Ț ț). These character were added to Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian standardization institute. Font support for these characters is poor, so the Romanian Wikipedia represents these letters with an S-cedilla (Ş ş) and T-cedilla (Ţ ţ) instead.[2]
See also
- Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)
- Help:Multilingual support (Indic)
- Help:Special characters
- Wikipedia:Amharic
- Wikipedia:Bangla script display help
- Wikipedia:Gothic Keyboarding
- Wikipedia:Gothic Unicode Fonts
- Wikipedia:Kannada support
- Wikipedia:Sinhala Font Guide
Notes
- ^ Until June 2005, when MediaWiki 1.5 came into use on the Wikimedia projects, articles on the English Wikipedia were encoded using ISO/IEC 8859-1 (although the additional characters from the Windows-1252 character set were used in practice.) All characters from the ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Character Set could be accessed through numerical entities, as specified by the HTML 4.01 specification. Since, nearly all pages have been converted to use Unicode directly.
- ^ See also ro:Wikipedia:Diacritice