Even the characters with no weight can be given weight in their own special way

Coming soon to the European Union: Bulgaria and Romania!

These are a couple of important events and have led to updates of the Times New Roman and Arial fonts in the European Union Expansion Font Update (a WGA download).

I will pine for Romanian and Bulgarian versions of the download page (nothing there yet but having those links in the blog will make it easier to check!).

One fun bit of text on the download page:

These characters are not accessible on the Windows XP keyboards for Bulgarian and Romanian. You may use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) to define your own keyboard layout.

You can also access the characters via Character Map
Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Character Map

If you are using an Office Product you can use the application's Insert Symbol function to input the characters as well.

I think MSKLC might be approching ubiquity! :-) 

Now, the six code points in question are:

U+0218    Ș    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW

U+0219    ș    LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW

U+021a    Ț    LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW

U+021b    ț    LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW

U+040d    Ѝ    CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER I WITH GRAVE

U+045d    ѝ    CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER I WITH GRAVE

Now in the end the primary importance of fonts is in display, so from a cynical view I guess you could be cynical say that this is just for show. Though since it was apparently specifically requested by the Court of Justice in Luxembourg and the European Commission it is obviously not just for show at all. It is considered to be an important gesture of support for the needs of what will be the newest members of the European Union.

I'll be covering the Romanian characters another day (I have an Every Character Has a Story post about the four Romanian "comma below" characters that I expect will be posted some time this week). It goes into many of the interesting ISO and Unicode and encoding and even keyboard issues that these characters raised. So stay tuned for more on this....

But the Bulgarian characters have a special place of their own here since it is the first CYRILLIC SCRIPT EU language, and basically one of only two non-LATIN SCRIPT EU languages (the other one is Greek). How the EU works to see this addition through will be interesting (support of Greek in the EU has actually had its share of technical issues over the years).

Now although these issues are weighed quite heavily, the truth is that all of these six characters have no weight in collation, a factoid that affects all versions of Windows prior to Vista, SQL Server, Access/Jet, and so on. A change here to address this would have dire consequences in applications, forcing re-indexing and/or potential index corruption on a global scale. Vista does address this issue, however, which makes Vista the best release to give both Bulgaria and Romania the weight that they of course deserve.

And along those lines, here is a screenshot of an RTM build of Vista with a huge number of MUI and LIP languages installed:

Note the language selected at the top of the list and also the language highlighted farther down....

I suppose if one was feeling ornery enough one could argue that UI language is just for show, too. But obviously it is more than that -- it is a commitment to the native speakers of a language in the concrete desire to give people a better "local" experience. :-)

This post brought to you by  Ѝ (U+040d, a.k.a. CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER I WITH GRAVE)