Romanian fonts

For some reasons - now they are becoming unknown even to me - I use Windows Vista for some time. At first there was this curiosity that was impossible to control; now I guess there’s only the habit of seeing some bling-bling window management like transparency. But the most important cause for which I don’t format its partition is that I’m tired out of installing Windows XP again in the place Vista is. Confusing, I know.

Anyway, that’s not the real topic of this post. The post is about the Romanian fonts “ș”, “Ș”, “ț” and “Ț”.

Because of the lack of interest of the Romanian Academy for this topic, there wasn’t an official standard for these fonts until it was too late. Although any Romanian knows should know that the fonts in question are written using a comma under them, they were implemented with a cedilla prior to Windows Vista, using the association with the Unicode Latin Extended-A standard, instead of Unicode Latin Extended-B standard. The problem arises when an XP user tries to read these characters generated by programs under Vista, seeing a bunch of squares instead. The same happens when a Linux user tries to read that text too.

Microsoft has released an update to XP’s keyboard driver, making the Romanian fonts described above available for Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman. I have tried to test them from Linux (UBUNTU 7.10) to XP, as the new distros implement the correct Romanian characters, using the comma. With Arial as the font selected for use in Pidgin (an instant messaging client with different protocols), the XP user still couldn’t see the correct characters, blank squares appearing instead. I tried the same in Vista, same result.

Also, Microsoft has released Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator which I have tried to use for creating the correct mapping for the Romanian emulated keyboard, layout that has been tested after I have installed the update to XP’s driver. Guess what?! Microsoft fucked has done it all wrong again. It simply doesn’t work the way it should, XP being unable to produce the correct fonts for “ș”, “Ș”, “ț” and “Ț”. All that I can say is that “UBUNTU works swimmingly!” and of course that Microsoft sucks ass has some minor glitches that we all hope will be fixed in a near future. The problems will be greater and greater as web developers will create Romanian pages using tools from Vista or the new Linux distros because the XP users won’t be able to see the correct content.

So let’s all hold hands together and pray for the non-suckyness in future fixes from the great company named Microsoft!