I heard from Cristian Secară from Romania again not too long ago:

Hi Michael,

First: thank you for your feedback regarding the Windows Keyboard Layouts page (your blog on 05 November).

Second: Tudor pointed me out, and then read on your blog (your blog on 19 November) about the European Union Expansion Font Update for Romanian and Bulgarian. One thing I want to add here: although the covered fonts are ok for physical written documents (and thanks to MS for that !), there is at least one more important font required here: Verdana. This is required for virtual written documents (i.e. internet). Just from the early days of RC 1 beta testing I encountered discussions on forums, where some are saying something like "hey, look, Vista has the new keyboard layout included, I am using it right now !", while the answer was something like "hey, stop using it, we have difficulties in reading your post". Why ? Because the originator used Vista to write his post and the reader was on XP, so the ș and ț appeared as blank squares to the reader.

There is nothing unexpected about that user behaviour giving the existing situaton, but if a font update  is on the way already, why then not complete the picture starting from right now ?

Some points here (my own speculations):

  • it may be important that existing XP users will not be disapointed about the new Vista, just because one single important font update is missing; I mean if the average XP user without much knowledge will see blank squares in messages written by Vista enthusiasts, they may have a bad influence in convincing others that Vista has "problems" with the Romanian language; again, in short term this may be an expected behaviour, but why not complete the fix if the fix has been already
    started in some way ?
  • it would be fine if Verdana is updated, because this can lead to write and read pages in correct Romanian as quick as possible; I know this will be a long process (months/years), but why not start from right now ?

Verdana is the most used font for web pages, at least, today in XP. I consider an update to this font to be equal in importance like the Arial and Times New Roman requested by EU. I am speaking for Romanian, I don't know what font the Bulgarian sites uses for most ...

Cristi

PS: I told to Tudor that the minimum font update should be Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman and Verdana, perhaps Georgia too; but I can live for now just with Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana update :)

--
Cristian Secară

Well, I suppose I could claim that as soon as I connected with Judy of the Microsoft Typography PM team that my extensive authority and influence led to everyone dropping what they were working on and providing an update to the update to include Verdana.

In truth, when I mentioned this mail to her, she let me know that they were already working to update the update to include Verdana.

And it is now available!

You can check out the updated European Union Expansion Font Update (which still has neither Romanian nor Bulgarian translations of the download page available but I continue to hope for the future!), a download that not only includes

Times New Roman (regular ȘșȚțЍѝ, bold ȘșȚțЍѝ, italic ȘșȚțЍѝ, and bold italic ȘșȚțЍѝ)

and

Arial (regular ȘșȚțЍѝ, bold ȘșȚțЍѝ, italic ȘșȚțЍѝ, and bold italic ȘșȚțЍѝ)

but now also includes

Verdana (regular ȘșȚțЍѝ, bold ȘșȚțЍѝ, italic ȘșȚțЍѝ, and bold italic ȘșȚțЍѝ)

Enjoy!

(I still owe several posts here about the Romanian letters and keyboards, and will be getting to them soon!)

 

This post brought to you by Ș (U+0218, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW)