Wrong glyphs for characters "Ş" (U+015E), "ş" (U+015F), "Ţ" (U+0162) and "ţ" (U+0163) in default fonts

[Mihai Capotă]

The default fonts in Ubuntu 9.04 have the wrong glyphs for characters "Ş" (U+015E), "ş" (U+015F), "Ţ" (U+0162) and "ţ" (U+0163). Their descriptions say "Latin [capital/small] letter [S/T] with cedilla" while the glyphs are all rendered with commas.
The glyphs are indistinguishable from those for characters "Ș" (U+0218), "ș" (U+0219), "Ț" (U+021A) and "ț" (U+021B), "Latin [capital/small] letter [S/T] with comma bellow".
This makes it impossible to distinguish between the two types of characters in a text.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: ubuntu-desktop 1.139
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=ro_RO.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-meta
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64

[Mihai Capotă (mihaic)]

I still see the bug in Karmic.

[Mihai Capotă (mihaic)]

I still see the bug in Lucid.

[Mihai Capotă (mihaic)]

Created an attachment (id=37740)
Firefox rendering both with and without locl at the same time

DejaVu currently uses locl substitution for Romanian, as introduced with SVN revisions 2258, 2259 and 2260.

These substitutions are causing confusion.

The problem with Romanian letters Ș and Ț is ongoing; it is in no way historical. The best example I can think of is the Romanian Wikipedia still using the old Unicode code points for compatibility reasons, and even automatically transforming the new code points in edited text to the old code points. [1]

Furthermore, the implementation of locl is not uniform. For example, Firefox and Chromium use locl in the GUI, but don't use it for content. See the attached screenshot from Ubuntu 10.04.

In these circumstances, the false consistency introduced by the locl substitutions only makes things worse by confusing people about the code points they are using.

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

[Ben Laenen (benlaenen)]

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.

[Mihai Capotă (mihaic)]

The bug belongs to DejaVu. I reported it upstream.

It would be easy to fix in Ubuntu by reverting DejaVu SVN commits 2258, 2259 and 2260.

[Mihai Capotă (mihaic)]

The default font in Ubuntu changed to the Ubuntu font where the problem was fixed. See bug 635615.