RIP ISO 8859?

A recent edit to the en Wikipedia article on ISO 8859 added this bit:

The ISO/IEC 8859 standard was maintained by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 2, Working Group 3 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3). In June 2004, WG 3 disbanded, and maintenance duties were transferred to SC 2. The standard is not currently being updated, as the Subcommittee's only remaining Working Group, WG 2, is concentrating on development of ISO/IEC 10646.

Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text faces

I was just pointed to a document on diacritic design (1.4 MB PDF) on the CONLANG mailing list and thought it might be of interest if there are any typography buffs out there.

Basically, it talks about how to design diacritical marks such as acute accents or ogoneks on letter such that they will look good and balanced, and how that can sometimes even depend on the language you are typesetting.

Context is your friend

A while back, I asked Swetlana at work how to spell "Natalya" in Russian.

"With a soft sign," she answered, and hit the mark—she understood that my question was whether the spelling was "Наталя", "Наталья", or "Наталия", so she provided me with what differentiated between those, rather than spelling out the entire name.

Context is your friend, and saves you from providing more information than necessary.