Re: Serving webfont via Toolforge by default

Hello everyone,

Thank you for your responses!

Yes, I also believe that introduce a new font in ULS or the wiki itself is definitely a better choice, but I doubt if the maintainers of ULS will allow that since the webfont feature is in maintenance only mode. Can they be reached out here? I believe we do have a valid use case.

Also, in our minimum product, we do take unicode-range​ into account. We also attempted to minimize traffic by creating a single-glyph font dynamically on the server side, but the Toolforge availability problem still exists.

Best regards,
diskdance

On Monday, November 3rd, 2025 at 4:34 AM, Travis Briggs <[email protected]> wrote:

> For conditional loading you can just use the CSS `unicode-range` property (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/unicode-range) and the browser will only load the font if one of the codepoints that you specified that it handles is present in the page.
>
> -Travis
>
> On Sun, Nov 2, 2025 at 12:28 PM Amir Sarabadani <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> In Persian Wikipedia, people who want to use a different font (e.g. Vazir) that are free, they just load them through a gadget: For example https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%AF%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C:Gadget-Vazir.css
>> (See the full list of font gadgets [https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/ویژه:ابزارها](https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%98%D9%87:%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7) in fonts section)
>>
>> If you're working to allow better rendering of rare characters, my suggestion would be to load the font only conditionally on pages that use the rare characters, for example using categories (you can now load a gadget if a category exists: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets#Options) or alternatively a js detecting the issue and loading the gadget (which might cause FOUC so not really recommended). In Persian Wikipedia, we wanted to load poems with a different look (Nastaliq) and the idea we came up with was to basically, if Template:Poem is used, then load a font gadget to show the poems differently.
>>
>> HTH
>>
>> Am So., 2. Nov. 2025 um 21:14 Uhr schrieb Brian Wolff <[email protected]>:
>>
>>> I'd really hope an alternative could be found here. Either let a new font into ULS or allow the webfont to be uploaded to the local wiki as a file on a one-off basis.
>>>
>>> I personally think loading anything by default from toolforge is really bad policy. (To be clear, im just a rando, this is just my personal opinion)
>>>
>>> On Sunday, 2 November 2025, diskdance via Wikitech-l <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello everyone,
>>>>
>>>> The Chinese Wikipedia is holding a discussion [1][2] about wiping out tofus when displaying rare Chinese characters. During the discussion, one option turned out to be serving a webfont covering all CJK planes, which was the practice on Chinese Wikipedia more than a decade ago before it was disabled for security reasons. Since the reasons are still valid and ULS is no longer accepting new font additions, so the only feasible way to achieve this is to serve the webfont via a Toolforge domain.
>>>>
>>>> Due to potential impacts of this proposal, I'm writing to ask:
>>>>
>>>> - Is it acceptable to serve a webfont (conditionally or not conditionally) via Toolforge by default, policy-wise?
>>>> - And is it acceptable in terms of performance (since Toolforge is not using Wikimedia's CDN)?
>>>>
>>>> [1] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E4%BA%92%E5%8A%A9%E5%AE%A2%E6%A0%88/%E6%8A%80%E6%9C%AF#%E7%94%9F%E5%83%BB%E5%AD%97webfont
>>>> [2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E4%BA%92%E5%8A%A9%E5%AE%A2%E6%A0%88/%E6%8A%80%E6%9C%AF#%E4%BB%8B%E7%BB%8D%EF%BC%9AWebFont-ZH%E6%9C%8D%E5%8A%A1%E5%8F%8A%E5%B0%8F%E5%B7%A5%E5%85%B7
>>>>
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> diskdance
>>>
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>> --
>>
>> Amir (he/him)
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