User talk:Stephen G. Brown

Thanks

Hi Stephen,

I just wanted to quickly thank you for your attentiveness in the Azerbaijan entry not allowing vandal Rovoam to get along with his sneaky vandalism. He introduced his "traditional" vandalism in this edit ([1]) (just above the "Line 66"), which unfortunately went unnoticed by User:Picapica ([2]), but you fixed it promptly [3]). In the past Rovoam tried to introduce similar sneaky vandalisms in Azerbaijanis (e.g. [4]), Azeri (e.g. [5]) and many other Azerbaijan-related and even unrelated entries, such as Ottoman Empire (e.g. [6]) or Ottoman Turks (e.g. [7]).

This person has been literally terrorizing various Azerbaijan and Turkey-related entries in WP, adding sneaky and blatant vandalisms of anti-Azeri and anti-Turk character. I am grateful to you along with many other editors, who track down and neutralize all his spurious edits.--Tabib 13:35, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

• You’re welcome, Tabib. We’re experience similar problems with some of the Slavic pages, especially those concerning the languages and peoples of Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia. Where I’m from, such ethnic and cultural bigotry was dealt with and virtually eliminated decades ago, and today we find it difficult to believe that these attitudes are still rampant in large parts of the world. —Stephen 06:46, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Unicode fonts

There has been a lot of discussion about {{unicode fonts}} and the order in which the fonts should be listed. What happens is that the browser (usually IE) scans the list and uses the first font it finds which is currently installed. This is why the rarer fonts are listed first: if a user has installed one of these it will be used. If you front-load the list with the more common, less populated, fonts then those users who have installed the less common better-populated fonts do not gain the benefit.

The article you asked about, Bulgarian language, looks fine to me. I note with interest that it actually uses {{unicode}} for "(Ѣ, ѣ)" and "(Ѫ, ѫ)": how do those now look to you?

That must be because you have some of those unusual fonts installed. I inserted the {{Unicode}} template into the Bulgarian page precisely so I could see the letters. Since the fonts were switched around, all I see in the above four letters are big, blank boxes. —Stephen 7 July 2005 13:12 (UTC)

If you are working extensively in cyrillic, there might be benefit in co-opting {{cyrillic}} (which currently REDIRECTs to {{Cyrillic alphabet}} for some reason) to specify fonts which are rich in cyrillic characters (as with {{polytonic}} for greek): would that help? HTH HAND --Phil | Talk July 7, 2005 10:59 (UTC)

Hmm. Perhaps I will make a new template using the "Unicode fonts" font order before they got switched around. The problem will be finding all of the instances of {{Unicode}} that I have inserted. I think there are quite a few of them...it will take a long time to find and change them.

As I understand it, Windows (or whatever program it is that handles this) only considers the first couple of fonts in a list. Fonts deep in the list might as well be taken out, because they are ignored. If you don’t have a font that comes early in the list, then you get the default font, which I believe is usually Times New Roman. However it works, these lists do not work on my machine unless my fonts are at the head of the list...and I only have the standard Windows set. —Stephen 7 July 2005 13:12 (UTC)

I have Code2000 which appears fairly close to the front of the list: maybe this would help since it claims to have good coverage of Cyrillic. You could also try here. --Phil | Talk July 7, 2005 15:39 (UTC)