The frustration with Romanian language diacritics

Woke up early this morning for some reason... Anyway, I have to say that I'm really, really frustrated with how few people use Romanian diacritic characters properly on the Internet. I mean, I don't get what's so hard with using them... especially since most other languages seem to use them without any problems. I'm talking here about the characters ă â î ş ţ, five characters which act as separate letters in the Romanian alphabet, similar to how German uses ä, ö and other umlaut characters.

The diacritic characters are necessary in Romanian, or otherwise the language becomes ambiguous. I am frustrated though by the blatant ignorance that so many people have for these characters which are such an integral part of our language. This is even prevalent on large corporate sites or in the online mass media! Remember, if we don't use them now, they'll disappear sooner or later, and then Romanian will no longer be a phonetic, precise language.

The problem is that besides from people not using them at all, other people use them incorrectly, in a non-standard manner, which then further discourages their use on the Internet.

Basically, I tend to group problems with diacritic symbols into three:

• Those who don't use them at all. Basically, people who write lamaie instead of lămâie or Bucuresti instead of Bucureşti. Yes, of course, people can understand the words without the diacritics, but the Romanian language has diacritics, just like German, Czech, Estonian, French, Spanish, etc. It's disappointing to see sites like Connex, Gardianul, Evenimentul Zilei, etc, not using diacritics at all.
• Those who use the wrong encoding. When typing with Romanian diacritics, remember to encode in Unicode. Some people encode in the Latin-1 character set and then wonder why the ş and ţ characters don't come up well. Others encode in Central European, which is a non-standard encoding that shouldn't be used and causes problems with some people. Use Unicode and you'll be fine. It's the universal encoding, it can be used for every language and it works excellently for Romanian diacritics.
• Those who use special fonts. The reason I'm writing this whole entry is because yesterday someone sent me a document, which contained diacritics, but used an ambiguous font called Garamond Gw (different from the mainstream Garamond), which is specifically designed for Romanian characters. As I don't have the font, all the diacritics were replaced by brackets and apostrophes, making the text totally unreadable. The point I'm trying to make here - don't use need special fonts to write Romanian diacritics because they'll cause problems and scare people away from diacritics. Romanian diacritics are supported by all major fonts such as Times New Roman, Georgia, Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, etc. Don't use obscure fonts that no-one has!
  

So, remember this. Romanian diacritics are easy to use. Just because Internet use is going up in Romania doesn't mean that we can abanon diacritics. They're an integral and necessary part of our language, and should I say it again, they're easy to use! Just use a major font - any major font - not obscure ones, and type in Unicode and use a Romanian keyboard layout. As long as you use this, anybody will be able to view your text properly with diacritics, unless they don't have basic fonts like Times New Roman or Arial! Or they have totally outdated software which doesn't support Unicode, in which case they should upgrade.

Honestly, it's not that hard. If the contributors on the Romanian Wikipedia can do it, so can you. So, come on, for those of you who don't use diacritics in e-mail, or even worse, in documents and websites, try to make an effort to write proper Romanian. We need it.