Even today, it is quite hard to find any Romanian or Latvian web page using the new Unicode characters with a comma-below: even governmental sites use the characters coded with the cedilla, and they support that this comma below is rendered approximately, as this does not cause interpretation problems for readers.
Yes, and this is going to remain a problem for some time to come. From the typography end, we're looking at addressing this at the display end, but this relies on support for OpenType Language System tags which is not in place yet. For example, OpenType fonts can contain <locl> Localised Forms feature lookups that map the Scedilla glyph to the Scommaccent glyph when the Romanian Language System is selected. This doesn't solve the underlying document encoding problem, but at least it gets documents that use the old/wrong characters for Romanian to display correctly.
May be we could militate here so that Microsoft includes at least the characters for Latvian and Romanian (at least the precomposed characters, even if a decomposed comma-below is not rendered correctly) in a update of its "Times New Roman", "Arial", "Verdana" and "Tahoma" fonts for the web...
All of these fonts already include the newer Romanian S/s and T/t commaaccent characters and correct accent forms for the Latvian diacritics (although the Arial comma accent is a bit too much like an unattached cedilla).
By the way, since no real world use has been found for a T/t with a cedilla attached, most font developers do not include a glyph for it, and instead double map the T/tcommaaccent glyph to both the cedilla and commaaccent diacritics.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges
