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]	Office 2000 (0.84) Office 2003 (1.01)
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
Aboriginal	sans serif, serif		Freeware	OpenType	Unicode 5.2
Charis SIL	serif		Open Source	OpenType	Unicode 5.1
Code2002			Freeware (must not be altered)		Unicode, plane 2
Code2001 0.919			Freeware (must not be altered)		Unicode, plane 1
Code2000 1.171	sans-serif		Shareware (unrestricted)	TrueType	Unicode, plane 0
DejaVu	Sans, Sans Mono and Serif		Open Source	OpenType	Unicode 5.1
Doulos SIL	serif		Open Source	OpenType	Unicode 5.1
Everson Mono 3.2b4	monospace		Shareware	TrueType	Unicode
TITUS Cyberbit Basic	serif		Non-commercial		Unicode 4.0
Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts (Greek, Egyptian, cuneiform...)	Aegean, Aegyptus, Akkadian, Alexander, Analecta...	󳩄, Ͱ
Japanese

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 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.

Scripts

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	File:Koreantexttest.png	모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.

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	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

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
Sinhala		ඵ + ේ → ඵේ
Tibetan		ར + ྐ + ྱ → རྐྱ
Tamil		க + ே → கே
Telugu		య + ీ → యీ

Burma

Available fonts

Font	License	Unicode	OpenType	Graphite
Padauk 2.6	OFL	×	×	×
Parabaik	OFL, GPL	×	×
Parabaik Sans	OFL, GPL	×	×
Myanmar3 Myanmar3 from BBC website	LGPL	×	×
Myanmar2	LGPL	×	×

Coptic

This is the Language used in Egypt before Arabic. It is currently used solely as a liturgical language.

Quivira 3.1: Use this for the best Coptic letter/ word spacing and sizing. It provides full Unicode support for all Coptic letters.
GNU FreeSerif

Cherokee

Digohweli, from LanguageGeek

Deseret

Canadian Syllabics (Inuktitut, Cree)

Aboriginal Sans (Unicode), from LanguageGeek

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 (C, 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 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]

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.
^ http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/435/
^ http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#text
^ See also ro:Wikipedia:Diacritice

External links

[1] 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.

[2] ttp://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/435/

[3] ttp://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#text

[4] See also ro:Wikipedia:Diacritice

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