Last modified: 2012-12-14 11:41:02 UTC
A lot of wikis require you to install a font for you to be able to display text on the site correctly. These fonts do not come with windows and currently acquiring them can be very difficult. Generally some external site is being used. The problem is these external sites tend to disappear after a while.
Do we have some file magic/validity checkers for TrueType/OpenType font files? Some metadata extraction wouldn't hurt either; a traditional bugaboo about font files is that most of them are copyrighted, so it'd be handy to have some of the creator/copyright metadata pulled out for display to aid in confirming that uploaded files are legit and free.
I think this kind of uploads are very rare. If you need a TTF file uploaded, a developer can check the file manually and upload it manually bypassing the checks. => Closing.
Once the Web Open Font Format has been approved, http://www.w3.org/Submission/WOFF/, then this might become possible. Meanwhile moving it from site request to Mediawiki.
I think WOFF is fairly stable these days, and account to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Open_Font_Format#Vendor_support .woff fonts should work in current versions of all major desktop browsers. Doing webfonts reliably on older browsers though requires outputting several font formats; [[mw:Extension:WebFonts]] for instance tends to have .eot, .ttf, and .woff (and sometimes also .svg). In theory it should be possible to create .eot and .woff from .ttf or .otf, or some such, for an extension that specifically helps make uploadable fonts work, but that'll require some external tools.
No plans to currently investigate this, hence closing as WONTFIX to get rid of deprecated LATER resolution in Bugzilla. In general, Universal Language Selector is used and WebFonts is integrated in it, see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector .
