Difference between revisions of "Template talk:Mark"

Revision as of 06:29, 20 May 2015

Don't use the drag icon as a unit

Hi, not everything in the infobox needs a unit especially if there is no unit. This is especially true for drag as it's just a unit-less coefficient. — xZise [talk] 14:28, 26 October 2014 (CDT)

New 0.90 icons

I think using new 0.90 icons should be better... I mean the icons available in the new editor parts filter system.

Are there many icons which could be replaced by already existing ones here? Also note that most images here are vector graphics and made from hand. Maybe it's possible to get the official images but I don't know how. — xZise [talk] 16:56, 4 January 2015 (CST)

A few of the marks are unsupported by default on windows

Three of the Unicode symbols used for marks, namely:

Science mark - ⚛ - ATOM SYMBOL (U+269B) 
Flag mark - ⚑ - BLACK FLAG (U+2691)
Electric charge mark - ⚡ - HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN (U+26A1)

are not included in any of the default Windows fonts. This isn't a problem for anyone using Firefox, Linux/Mac, or who have installed a font that fully supports Unicode (or a program that includes such a font), but is a problem for many Google Chrome users, because Chrome on Windows only uses the currently installed fonts to render characters, and defaults to a missing character symbol if no fonts support it. All three of those symbols are in the "Miscellaneous Symbols" Unicode block, which is largely unsupported by the default Windows fonts (Arial only renders 12 of the 256 characters in the block). — Preceding unsigned comment added by VariousMetals (talk • contribs) 14:27, 19 May 2015‎

I can't immediately offer a complete solution, but here's a step in the direction of one. Modern web browsers can be told to download fonts on demand via more advanced CSS. This could possibly be used to specify a font which contains all of the necessary symbols. The missing parts of the fix are that I can't point you at an example font to use, and am not giving the specific CSS for it, just a pointer into Mozilla's docs:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face

It looks like it's supported by all major browsers.

--Murph (talk) 15:28, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Hmm is http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/274c/index.htm U+274C (❌)] also problematic? User:NWM has changed it to U+2715 (✕). And according to fileformat.info is the latter a multiplication sign while the former is a cross sign, so more appropriate for a “no”.

- It had no bold variant. It is already bold. NWM (talk) 17:14, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

And regarding CSS I'm not sure how much we can do with the Wiki software about it, but there is w:Template:Unicode which might be what we need (at least it looks like so in the description). If we need to edit MediaWiki:Commons.css I can do that although there it's only targeted at Windows XP. — xZise [talk] 16:45, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

If we wanted to use a downloadable font for symbols, it would just be a case of adding the correct magic block of code to the site's CSS, defining a font name and the URL for the font, I think. The font in question might need to be added to the wiki server itself, to be served as a raw file, unless it was hosted somewhere that should have good connectivity and uptime, like Google. It shouldn't require any deep changes to MediaWiki itself, just possible additions to MediaWiki:common.css and/or MediaWiki:common.js (it would only need JavaScript if we wanted to do something clever like only enable it for very specific browser+platform combinations, as Wikipedia have done).

I can't comment on whether the Wikipedia solution could work for newer versions of Windows than XP, as I don't use Windows, so am unable to tell what fonts are available, or check those fonts for the characters in question. It looks like technically, the Wikipedia solution targets all versions of Windows NT 5.x, which is 2000 and XP. The bones of their solution look reasonable enough, in terms of the span setting the class, and the JS to add the class for the platform that needs it. Their solution relies on the target system already having the necessary font installed, what I'm talking about is using an external font, but a variation of their method could easily be used to specify the external font.

I can help with both CSS and JavaScript, if need be, but won't do any detailed work towards it unless asked. I'm just floating high level detail on a possible solution here, leaving the decision about how to best address the issue to others.

--Murph (talk) 17:29, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

A quick correction: all these characters are actually supported by the version of the font "Segoe UI Symbol" included by default in Windows 8, and a patch for Windows 7 was rolled out in 2012 that would update that font to the newer version used in Win8. So this problem actually only affects computers using Windows Vista or earlier, or Win7 computers that don't have that patch. I'd imagine the Unicode patch was considered "minor" rather than "important", so any computers that are set to only download "important" updates or none at all probably don't have the updated font. VariousMetals (talk) 17:05, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Maybe a warning, with some notes and a link for the update would be useful... NWM (talk) 18:06, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

That's what Wikipedia does, actually: they put the template w:Template:SpecialChars at the top of the page, which includes a link to w:Help:Special_characters. The problem is that the symbols in the mark template are used almost everywhere in this wiki. VariousMetals (talk) 18:57, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, it would be on every part page, all the part tables, etc. I had a brief thought of maybe doing a clever alert via JavaScript, only for people lacking the necessary font, but a quick bit of research confirmed what I suspected, that there's no obvious reliable way to determine the user's font capability. I could be wrong on that, as I wouldn't call my research exhaustive (more like just a quick scrape around), but I couldn't spot a JS interface that would provide the info. We certainly could try to key it to just relevant versions of Windows, but it would alert for them regardless of having the fonts installed. Overall, that seems messy for this wiki (but a reasonable solution for a wiki that has only a minority of pages needing it). --Murph (talk) 19:35, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

I'd rather mean a small warning text on the "Main Page" and link to small "bugkiller" page explaining the solution by installing the font-packages (and has links to those fonts too) - NWM (talk) 06:28, 20 May 2015 (UTC)