Facebook + Unicode ≠ Love

The theme for the last days is the question marks instead of Unicode characters in various software products. In this case Facebook.

Facebook? Have you read this article written by Andrei Alexandrescu?

"The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got"

Coming back to question marks. I wanted to post a funny video on Facebook when I've noticed that Facebook gathered as description some undesired question marks:

If you go to the funny video (in Romanian) page you can see the caption as: „Primul șlagăr care te învață să scrii corect înjurăturile.”. No question marks there!

I'm sure there is an explanation why that happened... but it shouldn't have happened. Nobody said that Unicode is easy!

P.S. It seems Google+ does the same thing:

I was prepared to congratulate you Google on doing a better job than Facebook...

Thank you Google!

Google has finally fixed the Droid font family with regard to Romanian language (reported as a bug here). The font family can be downloaded from here, and more information about the release can be found here.

What came as a surprise was the fact that Google Web Fonts had proper Romanian support for Droid font family. This was not the case in the past, and still not the case for other font families like Ubuntu (reported as a bug here)

Thank you Google! (I would have welcomed a comment in the bug report though)

P.S. Google Web Fonts are not yet updated to cope with Romanian language. The picture above shows what one should expect (also when the font is installed in the system), and below is what one will really get.