[FM Discuss] How to change the font for editing or translation

[Clytie Siddall]

On 03/04/2010, at 11:27 PM, Lachlan Musicman wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 18:43, Clytie Siddall <clytie at riverland.net.au> wrote:
>> I've been leafing through the Help, but can't find out how to change the editing/translation font. The font shown is not optimal for my language (it shows the characters, but makes it more difficult to distinguish the combined diacritics), so I need to change it. The font shown is _not_ the font chosen in my browser prefs.
>> 
>> How do we change the font?
> 
> Good question - I can't see anything on the TinyMCE interface (or
> whatever the wysiwyg is)  and there are no font tags in the underlying
> html. Which makes me think that there is only the one font and it's
> unchangeable. Potentially originally conceived for a standard look, if
> it's not working for a potential target language, it should be re
> assessed.
> 
> Do you have a preferred font?

If it's only possible to set one font for the whole interface, I'd suggest using the Dejavu [1] font package (specifically Dejavu Sans and Dejavu Sans Mono). It's GPL, and we use it as the default install font at Debian because it supports so many languages effectively.

It's not the most beautiful font for _each_ language, but it's probably the best pan-Unicode FLOSS font. However, translators are going to prefer being able to set a language-specific font, if they're going to be staring at the text for long periods of time.

For Vietnamese specifically, I'd use the URWVN [2] package (also GPL), specifically Vn Nimbus Sans and Vn Nimbus Mono.

Ah... it looks like there is a workaround for this issue. I wasn't able to use the FM editing interface on my main browser (Omniweb on OSX), because the toolbar didn't display. I still have some pretty awful layout problems on Camino, but at least the toolbar is there. However, Camino doesn't have site-specific preferences like Omniweb. I've now tried overriding the font choice for ALL webpages in Camino, and that does change the display font in the interface.

So, if people don't mind doing that, it's a workaround. :S

I suppose we could also grab the original HTML and just use a source editor.

from Clytie 

Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team

[1] http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[2] http://freshmeat.net/projects/urwvn/