Help:Multilingual support

Contents on Wikimedia Commons 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.

Articles on Commons 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 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.

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]	Office 2000 (0.84) Office 2003 (1.01) Standalone US$99 from Ascender[2]
Lucida Sans Unicode [3]	Standalone US$20 to US$75 from Ascender[4]
Tahoma [5]
Microsoft Sans Serif [6]

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.)

Font	Typeface	Sample	License	Format	Encoding
Code2001 0.919			Freeware (must not be altered)		Unicode
Code2000 1.171	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		Bitstream Vera Fonts Copyright, Arev Fonts Copyright, Public Domain	TrueType	Unicode
FreeFonts		GPLv3	OpenType	Unicode

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 distributions ship with a Pango-based rendering engine which does, this may currently cause some display glitches with justified text, though.

Opera

tries to render any character using all the fonts available on the system so multilingual support is also good.^[2] Opera uses the operating system to perform contextual glyph selection, ligature forming, character stacking, combining character support and other character shaping tasks.^[3]

Chrome

Renders many, but not all characters... Does not render Oriya, Sinhala and Tibetan scripts from examples below, while Firefox doesn't render Sinhala only.

Main article: Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)

Script	Correct rendering	Your computer
Traditional Chinese		人人生來自由， 在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。 他們有理性和良心， 請以手足關係的精神相對待。
Simplified Chinese		人人生来自由， 在尊严和权利上一律平等。 他们有理性和良心， 请以手足关系的精神相对待。
Japanese		すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、 かつ、尊厳と権利と について平等である。 人間は、理性と良心とを授けられており、 互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。
Korean		모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.
Vietnamese Nôm		畧畑䀡傳西銘 𡄎唭𠄩𡦂人情喓𠻗 埃匕𠳺匕麻𦖑 𡨺噒役畧苓𠽮身𡢐

Main article: Help:Multilingual support (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
GNU FreeFont		GPLv3	TrueType and OpenType	Unicode

Main article: Help:Multilingual support (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
Odia		କ + େ → କେ
Sinhala		ඵ + ේ → ඵේ
Tibetan		ར + ྐ + ྱ → རྐྱ
Tamil		க + ே → கே
Telugu		య + ీ → యీ

Main article: Help:Multilingual support (Burmese)

Font	License	Unicode	OpenType	AAT	Graphite
Padauk 2.4	OFL	×	×		×
Parabaik	OFL, GPL	×	×
Parabaik Sans	OFL, GPL	×	×
Myanmar3	LGPL	×	×
Myanmar2	LGPL	×	×

• GNU FreeSerif

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 [[w:en:Luxury car|en:Luxury car]] to :en:Luxury car has to be entered in the edit box as [[w:en:Luxxury car|en:Luxxury car]] on :eo:. This has caused problems with interwiki update bots in the past.

The Romanian alphabet contains an S-comma (Ș ș) and T-comma (Ț ț). These characters 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.^[4]

• 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
• Help:Sinhala Font Guide

• Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources: Unicode and Multilingual Support in HTML, Fonts, Web Browsers and Other Applications
• Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems
• WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts
• SIL International: Computers and Writing Systems