Virgula de sub Ș

Sources

The standards documents, the technical record kept in Romania, and the journalism that covered this first.

Primary documents

  • Unicode Consortium, NamesList.txt, Unicode Character Database

    The annotation at U+015F reads: “the character 0219 should be used instead for Romanian.” U+0326 COMBINING COMMA BELOW is annotated “Romanian, Latvian, Livonian”, U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA “French, Turkish, Azerbaijani”.

    https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/NamesList.txt

  • Unicode Consortium, DerivedAge.txt, Unicode Character Database

    The source for the assignment dates used in the chronology: U+015E, U+015F, U+0162, U+0163 and U+0326 appear in Unicode 1.1; the range U+0218 through U+021F appears in Unicode 3.0.

    https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/DerivedAge.txt

  • Microsoft, European Union Expansion Font Update

    The 2007 update adding U+0218, U+0219, U+021A and U+021B to Times New Roman, Arial, Trebuchet MS and Verdana, for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. The original package is no longer distributed by Microsoft; the description and the file survive in the Download Center archive.

    https://legacyupdate.net/download-center/download/16083/european-union-expansion-font-update

  • Google Fonts, API css2, fișierele de font servite

    The type bench measures the files this service itself delivers: the static TrueType file sent to a legacy client and the latin and latin-ext woff2 subsets sent to a current browser, for 87 families.

    https://fonts.google.com/

Accounts and record

  • Michael S. Kaplan, The history of messing up Romanian on computers

    Sorting It All Out, 24 August 2011. The fullest account from inside Microsoft's globalization team: Latin-2 in 1987, the wording in the Unicode 1.1.5 documentation, the 1998 ISO revision closed with a substitution note, the 2007 font update. The original blog was withdrawn; the text cited here is the copy in the miloush.net archive.

    http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2011/08/24/10199324.html

  • Cristian Secară, ș-uri și ț-uri

    secarica.ro. The Romanian technical record of the standardisation effort, kept by the person who carried it: SR 13411:1999, SR 13392 in its 1998 and 2004 editions, the 2003 written confirmation from the Institute of Linguistics, the chronology of the ISO editions.

    https://www.secarica.ro/en/rou/s-uri-si-t-uri

  • Cristian Secară, Codarea în fonturi

    secarica.ro. Glyph names and the Adobe Glyph List tangle, where the comma drawing was placed on the cedilla code without the code changing. The four fonts in the bench that still build their letter from the glyph uniF6C3 carry precisely that name from the nineties.

    https://www.secarica.ro/en/rou/codarea-in-fonturi

  • Wikipedia, Romanian keyboard layout

    The summary of the two layouts in SR 13392:2004 and of the renaming of the old layout to Romanian (Legacy) from Windows Vista onwards.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_keyboard_layout

  • Iulian Comănescu, Diacriticele corecte

    comanescu.ro, March 2008. The first widely read practical explanation in Romanian: what the difference is, where the cedilla comes from, what to install. It already recommended fonts with Latin Extended, the test the bench here runs across 87 families.

    https://www.comanescu.ro/diacritice-corecte.html

  • Lavinia Gliga, ilustrații de Radu Manelici, De ce avem nevoie de diacritice

    Decât o Revistă, 8 March 2011. The editorial case for diacritics as infrastructure for understanding, written in the year when writing without them was still the norm in the Romanian online press.

    https://www.dor.ro/diacritical-marks/

  • Brandient, Kit on Romanian diacritics

    The studio's workshop note for designers drawing fonts with Romanian support, including the correct shape and position of the comma.

    https://brandient.com/kit-on-romanian-diacritics

What was written before

The technical chronology on this page rests, for the most part, on the record Cristian Secară has kept public for over twenty years at secarica.ro, the only place where the numbers of the Romanian standards, the dates of the ISO editions and the 2003 written confirmation from the Institute of Linguistics sit together. Anyone writing about the subject in Romanian starts there, even when they do not say so.

The account from inside Microsoft belongs to Michael S. Kaplan, who documented on the blog Sorting It All Out how Romanian came to be associated with Latin-2 and how the 1998 revision closed with a substitution note. The blog was withdrawn after his death; the text survives in the miloush.net archive.

In the Romanian press, Iulian Comănescu explained the difference and the practical steps in March 2008 at comanescu.ro, at a time when most online publications still wrote without diacritics at all. Lavinia Gliga made the editorial case in Decât o Revistă in March 2011, with illustrations by Radu Manelici. Brandient published the workshop note for designers drawing fonts with Romanian support.

The measurements on this page are new: the character count across 75 sites and the reading of the 87 font files.