Issue tracker: #MediaWiki-extensions-UniversalLanguageSelector

Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector

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MediaWiki extensions manual
File:OOjs UI icon advanced-invert.svg
UniversalLanguageSelector
Release status: stable
File:ULS-Display-Settings.png
Implementation User interface, Skin , Beta Feature
Description Tool that allows users to select a language and configure its support in an easy way.
Author(s) Wikimedia Language team
Latest version 2024-01-22
Compatibility policy Master maintains backward compatibility.
MediaWiki >= 1.40.0
Composer mediawiki/universal-language-selector
License
Download
<translate> Download extension</translate>
<translate> Git</translate> [?]:
Included in Language Extension Bundle
Help Help:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector
Parameters
  • $wgULSWebfontsEnabled
  • $wgULSGeoService
  • $wgULSLanguageDetection
  • $wgULSAnonCanChangeLanguage
  • $wgULSEnable
  • $wgULSImeSelectors
  • $wgULSIMEEnabled
  • $wgULSNoWebfontsSelectors
  • $wgULSFontRepositoryBasePath
  • $wgULSCompactLanguageLinksBetaFeature
  • $wgULSNoImeSelectors
  • $wgULSPosition
Hooks used
Not compatible with Internet Explorer 8 or lower.
Quarterly downloads Lua error in Module:Extension at line 172: bad argument #1 to 'inNamespace' (unrecognized namespace name 'skin').
Public wikis using Lua error in Module:Extension at line 172: bad argument #1 to 'inNamespace' (unrecognized namespace name 'skin').
Translate the UniversalLanguageSelector extension if it is available at translatewiki.net
Issues Open tasks · Report a bug

The Universal Language Selector is a tool that allows users to select a language and configure its support in an easy way. Where used, it also ships the functionality of both WebFonts and Narayam extensions (both of which have been deprecated in favour of Universal Language Selector). See Universal Language Selector for background and additional information.

Usage

The primary aim is to allow users to select a language and configure its support in an easy way.

The extension provides the following features:

  1. Flexible and easy way to select a language from a large set of languages.
    1. Selection can be based on geographical region based browsing, searching.
    2. Search can be based on ISO language code, language name written in current user interface language or in its own script(autonym)
    3. Cross language search - search language names using any script
    4. Autocompletion of language names
    5. Auto correction of spelling mistakes in search strings
    6. Geo IP based language suggestions
    7. Language selection based on users browser/OS language
  2. Input methods
    See Help:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/Input methods for complete instructions.
    1. An easily selectable input method collection, readily available in every editable field
    2. Provides a large set of input methods for wide range of languages
    3. Per-language input method preferences
  3. Webfonts
    1. A large collection of fonts to choose for each language to use as embedded font for the page
    2. Per-language font preferences
File:ULS-GeoIP.png
Universal Language Selector with geoip based language suggestion for a user from India
File:ULS-Display-Settings.png
Language settings allow a registered user accessing English Wikipedia to change the UI to their native language.
File:ULS-Font-Settings-new.png
A Bengali user is able to read content from the Bengali Wikipedia despite the lack of fonts in their computer. Web fonts are provided automatically for non-Latin scripts for which an open source font is available. The user can decide to use their system fonts on a per language basis.
File:ULS-Input-Settings.png
A Hindi speaker without a Hindi keyboard configures input methods so that they can type in their language.
File:ULS-Input-Search.png
When searching a user can switch between English and Hindi.

Adding fonts

Supporting more languages is only a matter of including the proper fonts in the code. However, please note that we will add support only for freely licensed fonts, for example fonts licensed under GNU GPL, SIL OFL, etc. An example directory of such free fonts is Google Fonts [1] (not yet fully examined/exploited by the authors of this extension); see also the Open Font Library.

First of all, you need to find or produce such a free font (this is the most important part and you have to do it yourself); then, it has to be converted to the required formats, which are eot, ttf, woff; finally, you can file a request in Phabricator for the font to be added to the extension.

#Preparing webfonts below explains how to convert the fonts: basic knowledge about GNU/Linux based operating system is required; if you have difficulty in doing this, you can skip this step and ask someone else to do it for you on the same Phabricator request (of course this will slow down the process).

Preparing webfonts

Creating .woff:

Use https://github.com/bramstein/sfnt2woff-zopfli to generate woff from ttf file. This will produce a compressed woff file.

Creating .woff2:

Use https://github.com/google/woff2 to generate woff2 from ttf. This will produce a compressed woff2 file. Modern browsers support this format.

Create a font.ini file. Here's an example: 

[AbyssinicaSIL]
languages=am*, ti*
version=1.200
license=OFL 1.1
licensefile=OFL.txt
url=http://scripts.sil.org/AbyssinicaSIL
ttf=AbyssinicaSIL.ttf
woff=AbyssinicaSIL.woff
woff2=AbyssinicaSIL.woff2
bold=AbyssinicaSIL Bold

[AbyssinicaSIL Bold]
ttf=AbyssinicaSIL-Bold.ttf
woff=AbyssinicaSIL-Bold.woff
woff2=AbyssinicaSIL-Bold.woff2

An asterisk (*) after a language code means that this font will be the default font for that language. If you just want the option to use this font for that language, don't use the asterisk.

After creating the files, do the following:

  1. Create a directory for the font under data/fontrepo/fonts.
  2. Put the ttf, woff, eot and font.ini files in that directory and add them to the source repository (git add).
  3. Go to the scripts/ directory and run php compile-font-repo.php.
  4. Commit the changes to the repository (git commit -a) and submit them according to the Git workflow.

Adding support for a new key mapping (input method)

Follow the instructions on the jquery.ime github wiki, but file requests in the Wikimedia-extensions-UniversalLanguageSelector Phabricator product.

Installation

  • <translate> [[<tvar name=2>Special:ExtensionDistributor/UniversalLanguageSelector</tvar>|Download]] and move the extracted <tvar name=name>UniversalLanguageSelector</tvar> folder to your <tvar name=ext>extensions/</tvar> directory.</translate>
    <translate> Developers and code contributors should install the extension [[<tvar name=git>Special:MyLanguage/Download from Git</tvar>|from Git]] instead, using:</translate>cd extensions/
    git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/UniversalLanguageSelector
  • <translate> Add the following code at the bottom of your <tvar name=1>LocalSettings.php </tvar> file:</translate> 
    wfLoadExtension( 'UniversalLanguageSelector' );
  • File:OOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg <translate> Done</translate> – <translate> Navigate to <tvar name=special>Special:Version</tvar> on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.</translate>


<translate> Vagrant installation:</translate>

  • <translate> If using <tvar name=vagrant>Vagrant </tvar>, install with <tvar name=code>vagrant roles enable uls --provision</tvar></translate>

Updating LanguageNameIndex

For performing cross language search, searching autonyms, language data needs to be populated. ULS comes with a pre-populated language name index(data/langnames.ser). In case you want to update it, install Extension:CLDR and update the data with the following command. 

php UniversalLanguageSelector/data/LanguageNameIndexer.php

and verify that langnames.ser file gets generated in ULS/data/ folder.

Configuration

The following variables are created automatically during initialization and can be used from JavaScript using mw.config.get( NAME ):

  • wgULSLanguages - an associative array where the keys are language codes and the values are language names in English.
  • wgULSAcceptLanguageList - an array of language codes from the user's Accept-Language value. These are the languages selected in the user's browser preferences.

For serving fonts, you might want to add the following MIME types to your webserver if not already there. This guide might help. 

font/woff .woff
application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot
application/x-font-ttf .ttf

The following variables can also be configured:

  • $wgULSGeoService - ULS can use geolocation services to suggest languages based on the country the user is visiting from. Setting this to false will prevent builtin geolocation from being used. You can provide your own geolocation by setting window. Geo to object which has key 'country_code' or 'country'. If set to true, it will query Wikimedia's geoip service. The service should return jsonp that uses the supplied callback parameter. Defaults to http://freegeoip.net/json/ (warning: this website has shut down its API) and expects the same format.
  • $wgULSEnable - Enable language selection, compact language links, input methods and webfonts for everyone, unless the behavior is overridden by the configuration variables below. Even if false the classes and resource loader modules are registered for the use of other extensions. Language changing via cookie or setlang query parameter is not possible.
  • $wgULSAnonCanChangeLanguage - Allow anonymous users to change language with cookie and setlang query param. Do not use if you are caching anonymous page views without taking cookies into account. Does not have any effect if either of $wgULSEnable or $wgULSEnableAnon is set to false.
  • $wgULSIMEEnabled - Disable the input methods feature for all users by default. Can still be enabled manually by the user.
  • $wgULSPosition - The location and the form of the language selection trigger. The possible values are: personal: as a link near the username or the log in link in the personal toolbar (default). interlanguage: as an icon near the header of the list of interlanguage links in the sidebar.
  • $wgULSNoImeSelectors - Array of jQuery selectors of elements on which IME must not be enabled. eg: [ '#wpCaptchaWord' ];
  • $wgULSLanguageDetection - Whether to automatically detect the user's language from the Accept-Language header.

Position of ULS trigger

  • $wgULSPosition - The location and the form of the language selection trigger. The possible values are: personal: as a link near the username or the log in link in the personal toolbar (default). interlanguage: as an icon near the header of the list of interlanguage links in the sidebar.

It is also possible to have ULS trigger anywhere in the screen. An element with uls-settings-trigger will act as a ULS trigger.

Overriding default fonts

ULS has a large font repository to serve as webfonts. Sometimes there are multiple fonts for a language and there is a default font for each language/script. The order of fonts or default font can be overridden as follows using global scripts (MediaWiki:Common.js) or personal scripts (Special:MyPage/common.js):

Caching configuration

To ensure that the web fonts files are cached on the clients' machines, font file types must be added to the web server configuration. In Apache2 this consists of:

  • Adding font file extensions to the FileTimes regex at FilesMatch for the relevant directory, example:

<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js|woff|svg|eot|ttf)$">

  • Adding ExpiresByType values to the relevant MIME types, similarly to image MIME types.
    • Note that there's no standard MIME type for TTF. application/x-font-ttf is used for Wikimedia.
  • Adding the MIME types:
AddType font/woff .woff
AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot
AddType application/x-font-ttf .ttf

For a full example see the caching configuration update done for the Wikimedia cluster.

Page translation

UniversalLanguageSelector is one of the dependencies of the Translate extension, which uses it for several language selection features. One of it is the MyLanguage system for links, which depends on the interface language of the user, but more can be configured: see Page translation feature.

Using Webfonts

User can choose webfonts for a language from the Language settings -> Display settings. By default, the first font in that menu will be applied to the wiki. A user can change the font and it will be remembered across the pages. Optionally user can disable the font embedding too by selecting system font.

If the font is available in user's local system, font will not be downloaded from the mediawiki server. It will be taken from the user's computer. Otherwise, font will be downloaded from the server only once. ie when the user selects the font first time. Next time onwards, font will be taken from the local cache.

Alternate ways to load fonts

By specifying font-family

Inside the wiki text <span style="font-family:'YourFontName';">YourText</span>, webfonts extension will check whether the font is available with the extension, if so it will download it to the client. So the reader will not face any difficulty in reading the text even if the font specified is not available in their computer.

By specifying language

Inside the wiki text <span lang="my">YourText</span>, webfonts extension will check whether any font is available for the given language with the extension, if so it will download it to the client. So the reader will not face any difficulty in reading the text even if the font specified is not available in their computer. If there are multiple fonts for the language, the default font will be used. If default font is not preferred, use the font-family approach to specify the font. If the tag has both lang and font-family definitions, font-family get precedence.

Example:

<span lang=sux>𒄖𒉈𒅁𒌨𒅎</span>

gives the text rendered in Cuneiform using Akkadian font

𒄖𒉈𒅁𒌨𒅎

See also

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