Comment 14 for bug 108057

Maybe some further info might help:
- the Linguistic Institute of the Romanian Academy only defines a comma unde s and t, so this is the way to go for any new project; cedilla unde s and t simply does not exists, officially speaking
- the cedilla under s and t is there only beacuse back in 1987 the ISO 8859-2 (Latin 2) standard associated these two characters with the Romanian language
- one of the reason for the above was that no Unicode characters s and t with comma below existed at that time; these have been introduced later, with Unicode version 3.0
- for 8 bit representation, the only standard that suits the Romanian language is ISO 8859-16 (Latin 10), which only appeared in 2001
- the only character recommended by the Linguistic Institute of the Romanian Academy that is outside the ISO 8859-16 standard is a character for "dialog and white pause, of equal lenght, which is longer than the hyphen sign"; in the Romanian keyboard standard, this has been associated with the en-dash (U+2013)
- Microsoft has no support for correct Romanian language in 8 bit representation; their CP1250 codepage is based around ISO 8859-2; no CP based on ISO 8859-16 actually exists; however, Microsoft strongly discourages *any* non-Unicode approach, so most likely 8 bit support for correct Romanian language will never be implemented (which is not that bad, in my opinion)
- officially, the Romanian language is normally supported by ISO/IEC 10646-1:2003 (i.e. Unicode) standard and by ISO/IEC 8859-16:2001 (Latin 10) standard if 8 bit support is explicitly required
- the correct Romanian ortography is enforced by law; because of this, Microsoft was forced to add support for correct Romanian language; this is limited to Unicode implementations, because the 8 bit support is officially discontinued; to date, only limited support is provided for WinXP (four updated fonts, Arial, Times New Roman, Trebuchet and Verdana); on the other hand, the fonts traditionally used for UI are already correct since long time ago (Microsoft Sans Serif and Tahoma); Palatino Linotype is also always correct

Now: the ş and ţ with cedilla should be left there only for backward compatibility reasons with some older applications. New keyboard layouts containing cedillas are NOT recommended, but may be necessary in some circumstances.

I don't know the past situation on Linux systems. I will describe wat is today the situation on Windows Vista:
- the old Microsoft Windows Romanian keyboard layout, formerly called "Romanian", is still there for compatibility reasons; it has been renamed to "Romanian (Legacy)"; the layout uses ş and ţ with cedilla, as before, and is a QWERTZ layout, as before
- layout 1 from the Romanian keyboard standard has been implemented with the name "Romanian (Standard)"; this one is considered the main Romanian keyboard layout, because it provides access to the complete Romanian alphabet directly on first level; this layout was first introduced as a standard in 1998 and has been later revised in 2004; this layout uses *only* ș and ț with comma below
- layout 2 from the Romanian keyboard standard has been implemented with the name "Romanian (Programmers)"; this ons has been added in the 2004 standard version merely as a facility (1) for programmers who only occasionally write in true Romanian language and (2) for Linux users who claimed they wanted US keyboard al the time, but wanted to be able to write in true Romanian language on purpose; this is true mainly for console users (or a mix), not for desktop-only users; this layout uses *only* ș and ț with comma below

It is important to note that the Romanian keyboard standard provides no mandatory names for its layouts, it only *recommends* "Romanian" for layout 1 and "Romanian (Programmers)" for layout 2. Beacuse of old existing layout names, in practice simply stay with "Romanian" with no other suffix may lead to confusions.

As far as I know, on Linux the most preferred layout is the second layout, that one which in Vista is called "Romanian (Programmers)". Giving the fact that this one has been introduced somewhat as a special request by Linux users, maybe it should be the default one, however, this should really be state by Linux users, not by me. The law recommends layout 1 as THE one, but does not force (by law) neither of the two in particular.

As a personal opinion, the Windows Vista Romanian keyboard layout names are quite well choosed. My keyboard layout driver for Windows XP now follows the exact names from Vista. Additionally I have build an additional two layouts, with the single difference that they are using ş and ţ with cedilla. These are not recommended to be used, but I agree that sometimes there is no other way round. My keyboard layout names are like that:
- Romanian (Standard)
- Romainan (Standard, with cedilla)
- Romanian (Programmers)
- Romanian (Programmers, with cedilla)
- Romainan (Legacy)

As stated before, the first, third and fifth are present by default in Windows Vista. The second and fourth are only available from my site.

As a personal opinion, the word "legacy" makes sense on systems where that layout really existed and was known before. I mean it makes no sense to call something legacy where something else (or nothing) was there before a given reference, or was unknown. In order to avoid this, my personal recommendation for the legacy layout was "Romanian (QWERTZ)" because the Y <-> Z is the most noticeable and annoying feature of this layout, but they choosed the sufix "lagacy" instead. Well, not really bad.

Cristi