Bug 29465

The problem is that many documents still use the S cedilla instead of S comma. Too many to ignore. And I agree it would be better if we could drop the locl on s cedilla, but we're far from that.

Trying to enforce it by changing the font doesn't work anyway. People use whatever they get when pressing the key on their keyboard, so that has to be changed if that still doesn't work properly in some operating systems.


The screenshot shows two different fonts in the webpage for s cedilla and s comma btw. That means that the font used for rendering s cedilla doesn't have a s comma and displays as such.

Sorry for not responding in such a long time. The default font in my distribution (Ubuntu) has changed and I was focused on making sure the new font is right for Romanian.

Would you please read the discussion on the Ubuntu locl substitution bug (no account required)?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/635615

I'm willing to change this and remove the locl substitution rules. It's certainly a hack, which was included to improve documents in Romanian using the wrong code points. But I guess the time has come to stop trying to fix a Unicode issue from many years ago.

I still wonder why Wikipedia wouldn't use the correct code points though. Looks to me like not all Romanians are agreeing with this then...

Actually, Wikipedia has also changed since I reported this bug. If you check the link I mentioned initially [1], you will see that the recommendation is to use the correct code points when editing. Furthermore, Wikipedia will automatically change the old code points into the new ones.

I did some more reading and I think I understand where this glyph substitution idea came from. Even after the new code points were created, the Unicode standard recommended the use of the comma glyphs for Romanian to represent the cedilla code points. This is what Unicode 5.2 (October 2009) says:

"The form with the cedilla is preferred in Turkish, and the form with the comma below is preferred in Romanian. The characters with explicit commas below are provided to permit the distinction from characters with a cedilla."

This recommendation about forms/glyphs was only removed in Unicode 6 (October 2010), which states:

"The Unicode Standard provides unambiguous representations for all of the forms, for example, U+0219 ș latin small letter s with comma below versus U+015F ş latin small letter s with cedilla. In modern usage, the preferred representation of Romanian text is with U+0219 ș latin small letter s with comma below, while Turkish data is represented with U+015F ş latin small letter s with cedilla."

[1] http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Diacriticele_vechi_%C8%99i_noi

I have just removed the locl features for these glyphs. Please test it out (either compile SVN or wait until the next daily snapshot becomes available) to make sure it works as you expect (we have a new release upcoming in one week time).

Ben

Tested with snapshot dejavu-lgc-fonts-ttf-2.32-20110219-2464. I confirm it works as expected. I can now see the difference between cedilla and comma characters regardless of application language. Thank you.