Support for Burmese and Tibetan fonts
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| psiphon |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Burmese and Tibetan fonts are not supported in all OSes/browsers. So simply adding the translations for those languages to lang.php won't be sufficient for many* users. The standard among other sites seems to be showing the font in Flash or images (not really desirable) or having an image that says something like "if you can't read the text on this page, download the font here".
Ideally, the Psiphon login page would have that image and links to the fonts. But right now we don't have the ability to link to a file through the login suffix. (Potential problem: In the past we have avoided loading images in the login screen due to traffic fingerprinting concerns(?). Wouldn't that apply to that image as well?**)
Alternatively (if we're okay with loading images on the login screen), for Burmese and Tibetan the all of the text on the login screen could be in images, and then we could prompt the user on the Bluebar to download the font if necessary (once their logged in it's pretty easy).
Alternatively #2, instead of hosting the fonts ourselves, we could link directly to external download sites. This raises the concern that users who visit those sites might be flagged as Psiphon users. On the other hand, if the download sites are very busy and we don't send many users there, it shouldn't be a problem. (Maybe we could rotate between different sites to dilute our traffic.)
* How many users *in* Tibet/China and *in* Burma actually don't already have those fonts installed on their computers? Is this actually a significant concern for us? (Note that unlike many other sites, we don't care about diaspora, since they don't have the censorship restrictions of those countries.)
** I suspect that this concern might totally kill the image idea. Maybe we can form the letters the same way that we form the Psiphon logo with ASCII art (except that it doesn't actually display properly in all browsers/OSes).
| visibility: | private → public |
| Adam P (adam+) wrote | #1 |
It has been suggested that there be the ability for language switching on the Terms of Use page and possibly on the Bluebar. This would enable users who don't have the correct font installed (and are seeing squares) to switch to a language that they can possibly navigate.
The Terms of Use language selector would probably be quite easy. A language selector on the Bluebar would more difficult (as it would involve a redesign of the layout), but still doable.