Messaje de Usador:Universal Life/Rashi

I'd just like to point out a couple of issues:

1. As things currently stand, nobody will see Rashi script unless s/he has this particular font already available in his/her browser locally. As far as I know, no open-source (or otherwise free-license) Rashi font has been installed on any Wikimedia wiki so far. If you are aware of one, we can certainly put in a phabricator request to have it installed here.
2. I think it's not at all clear whether a Rashi font should be the default Hebrew-script font on this project. There's certainly an argument to be made for it, and I don't have to recite that for you. At the same time there are some arguments to made against it, too.
   • There are two categories of people who can read Rashi script: (1) JS speakers (especially those of a certain age) and (2) people with enough Torah scholarship to be familiar with it (from Torah and Talmud commentaries, etc.). I imagine that most people who would use the Hebr-script pages here fall into one of those categories, but probably not everyone does. And I'm particularly concerned about not making things harder on younger JS speakers, of the type you and Maor are trying to recruit, who may be fluent Hebrew speakers and even fluent JS speakers, but are used to seeing written JS in Latn script (AY, perhaps). Square Hebrew letters are more familiar to a wider group of people than Rashi letters are.
   • We'd have to deal with the fact that page and section titles should probably remain in square letters, not Rashi, as was the common practice even JS literature.

So I'd be happy to have Rashi script available here, and even have a version of Main Page in it. But we really need to think carefully about how such a font would be used here. StevenJ81 (discusión) • 23 Av 5777 • 15:53 15 Ago 2017 (UTC)

Wow thank you for intuiting me and kindly returning a response :)

About 2b. I totally agree with you, all titles should be square no matter what.

So let me start by a couple of question, to understand better...

The only reason I see these in Rashi, is it because I've Rashi font installed in my pc?

Just out of curiosity, do you see them in Rashi?

Is the RashiAmiti font licenced in a form that the WM can't use it? (I don't really understand much of licenses)

I mean is it possible to put a request to upload this font into phabricator? (unfortunately I don't know any other Rashi fonts, but I can try to find out). I would be glad if you could enlighten me about this subject a bit :)

About the second point, let me start by one remark:

After creating this page - just to see how it will look -, as I was in the house of my cousins, I called my 20-years-old, JS-knowing cousin to see my screen...and as soon as he saw this page, his automatic response was "Aa, judió!"...meaning "Ah, JS". He identified it automatically with the language! His modern tongue is Hebrew and he still managed to read it all (albeit with a bit of difficulties recognising mostly "beth").

What I mean here basically is that, anyone Sephardi, anyone born into the Sephardic culture, identifies this script with Jewish Spanish. There are people, perhaps in their 40s to 60s, who would be extremely interested in JS WP - and who could contribute alot, if they could write in Rashi!

I don't believe anyone would be discouraged from Rashi, if it was too difficult for anyone to read, there would be always the Latin versions they could read (unless we would want to include both square and rashi variants into the WP...but I think it would simply be too much). On top of it, when they're editing or writing something, everyone would be writing in square versions anyway right?

And btw, the weekly newspaper "Şalom" in Turkey, dedicates a page to teaching Rashi since many years, and writes so many expressions and sentences in Rashi, on top of which always put a big table with letters and how to read them...and this is something they do since many years!! :)

The young people who are interested in joining, who speak JS and who knows Hebrew letters...they are usually quite zealous. They want to know more, learn more, contribute more...so all of it is just a tiny effort from their part to recognise some different forms (it took me half an hour to max. an hour to learn Rashi letters, while I had learnt Hebrew letters only 13 months ago...)

On top of all of it, thinking that this is the original script and most of the literature is in it and many young Ladino speakers want to revive this script, it would be more than awesome to have it here. (Actually it would even encourage me and for sure bring more people to here...)

PS. The last paragraph here is from a book that I have in the pdf format in JS from 1860. :) --Universal Life (discusión) 21:13 15 Ago 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the other page in Rashi. I see it in a square, sans-serif font, probably Arial. That's because I do not have the Rashi font locally loaded. (Question: does that font have the glyphs with rafe letters? We've been moving toward those, and away from using the geresh, in recent months.)

I'm not enough of an expert on licenses to know whether the רש"י אמיתי license is good enough for Wikimedia. It looks promising, but I just don't know. Let me ask.

I also think that in people's individual .js and .css files they can override font preferences. So if we make a Rashi font the default body font for Hebrew-script pages, and I decide I want square letters, I think I can still do that. (I do read Rashi script, but I'm faster with square letters.)

Except maybe for the main page, I would never want there to be separate square and Rashi versions of a page. After all, in this case we're talking about a typeface, not even orthography changes. If the community chooses to go Rashi, then it will be Rashi. (And if there is an actual Hebrew quotation on a page, we can always set the font for square just for the Hebrew quotation.)

I'm not quite sure how editing would work, especially with Visual Editor. For people who use a more traditional markup editor, where the letters in the editing box are all monospaced, typewriter-style characters, I suspect that will remain the case even if we have a Rashi display font here.

Finally: For the time being we cannot code pages as lad-Hebr, because that's not supported by Wikimedia. And the reason for that is because we don't have 13% of the core MediaWiki messages translated into lad-Hebr, only into lad[-Latn]. So we're still going to have to manually code these sections, and may have to call them "Hebrew" for the time being. And while it would be nice to eventually have pages coded as lad-Hebr and lad-Latn automatically, I don't think doing what it takes to get there should be our priority now. StevenJ81 (discusión) • 24 Av 5777 • 22:02 15 Ago 2017 (UTC)

The RashiAmiti font don't have rafe..it simply doesn't work with it, so I had to change them to geresh in this test page. About the lad-Hebr, in the longterm may be I'll be able to translate them :) Good night --Universal Life (discusión) 23:35 15 Ago 2017 (UTC)

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