Romanian writes ș and ț with a comma below the letter. Unicode encodes them as their own characters, U+0219 and U+021B (capitals U+0218 and U+021A), separate from ş and ţ with a cedilla, U+015F and U+0163, whose uses Unicode’s chart gives as Turkish and Azerbaijani, among others, for ş, and Semitic transliteration, among others, for ţ. A PDF shows these Romanian diacritics (diacritice) wrong for one of four reasons: the text was typed with the cedilla forms; the font has no comma-below glyphs; the font embedded in the PDF is a subset that left them out because the author never typed them; or the file maps its glyphs back to the wrong characters, so they copy and search wrong. The lasting fix is at the source: type the comma-below letters with the Romanian – Standard keyboard, in a font that has them, and export the PDF again. Each cause has its own check, below.
Comma below or cedilla: what is the difference between ș and ş?
They look alike at small sizes and are different letters. The Unicode chart files ș under “Additions for Romanian” as LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW, and under ş it adds a note: “the character 0219 ș should be used instead for Romanian”. The same note sits under ţ for ț.
| Letter | Code point | Name | Built from |
|---|---|---|---|
| ș, Ș | U+0219, U+0218 | S with comma below | s + U+0326, combining comma below |
| ț, Ț | U+021B, U+021A | T with comma below | t + U+0326 |
| ş, Ş | U+015F, U+015E | S with cedilla | s + U+0327, combining cedilla |
| ţ, Ţ | U+0163, U+0162 | T with cedilla | t + U+0327 |
The confusion is historical. The comma-below letters arrived in Unicode 3.0, which Unicode’s own character data records as their version; Wikipedia dates the addition to 1999, at the request of the Romanian standards body. Before that, the common encodings for Central Europe had only the cedilla letters; Wikipedia’s history notes the comma form “was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250”. A generation of keyboards, fonts and documents used ş and ţ for Romanian, and plenty still do.
Why does ș or ț show wrong or disappear in my PDF?
The text was typed with the cedilla letters. The PDF shows exactly what was typed. Old keyboard layouts and text copied from older documents produce ş and ţ. Search for “ș” will not find “ş”, and a Romanian reader sees the difference in print.
The font has no comma-below glyphs. Then the app that made the PDF draws the letter from another font, or draws a box or nothing. Fonts differ more than you might expect. On October 12, 2026, we checked the default face of 32 font families installed on a Mac with macOS 27.0.1:
- 28 hold all four comma-below letters, among them Helvetica, Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana, Palatino, Avenir Next, Futura, Baskerville, Charter, Menlo and Courier New;
- Didot and Andale Mono hold ş and ţ but not ș and ț;
- Gill Sans and Optima hold neither form, and no ă either.
The embedded subset left the letter out. PDFs often embed only the glyphs the document uses. A letter written without ș carries a font with no ș, even when the full font has one. The demo cover letter that ships with PDF Textfix’s sample set is built the same way on purpose, with an English example: its text has no accented letter at all, so its subsets have no é.
The glyphs map back to the wrong characters. Copy and search depend on the file’s map from glyphs to characters. Where a font names its ț glyph tcommaaccent and the PDF has no explicit map, a viewer that follows the Adobe Glyph List reads it as ţ: the list maps scommaaccent;0219 but tcommaaccent;0163, a cedilla letter. The page shows ț; the copy pastes ţ. The guide to copied PDF text that comes out as gibberish covers maps in general.
How do you type Romanian diacritics on a Mac?
Add a Romanian keyboard. Apple’s steps: open System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input, click Edit, click the Add button, search for Romanian, “Select one or more input sources for each language you want to use”, and click Add. Switch with the Input menu in the menu bar or Control-Space.
On the Romanian – Standard layout, read from the installed layout on macOS 27.0.1:
| Key on a US keyboard | Types | With Shift |
|---|---|---|
| Semicolon (;) | ș | Ș |
| Apostrophe (’) | ț | Ț |
| Left bracket ([) | ă | Ă |
| Right bracket (]) | î | Î |
| Backslash (\) | â | Â |
The older layout named just Romanian also types the comma-below letters, on other keys. Without a Romanian keyboard, the Character Viewer works: choose Edit > Emoji & Symbols, search for “comma below”, and click the letter (double-click it when the viewer is expanded).
What does an editor do when the PDF’s font lacks ș?
There are three ways an editor can handle a letter the font lacks: refuse the edit, draw the letter from another font, or offer a different letter. PDF Textfix draws it from another font and says so, and never puts one form in place of the other on its own: in its code the two pairs are listed as different characters that are never exchanged.
When you type ș into a line whose font lacks it, PDF Textfix looks for the letter in this order: another copy of the same font in the file, the same font installed on your Mac, then the closest standard font. For a font whose licence forbids deriving a new font from it, the app skips the other copies and the installed copy: the letter comes from a different font when one fits, or is refused with the licence as the reason. A letter taken from another copy of the font in the file is underlined while you edit; one drawn with a font from outside the file is orange, and the bar under the pages names that fallback font.
The demo cover letter shows the mechanism with a letter its subset lacks, an é. Correcting the writer’s own name in its heading from “Renee Okafor” to “Renée Okafor” keeps every letter in the letter’s IBM Plex Serif SemiBold except the é, which comes from Times-Bold, the closest standard font, marked in orange. A ș typed into a subset without one goes through the same steps:
If no font may draw the letter, it is marked red and the edit cannot be applied, with the reason: for example, “No font in this document or on this Mac can draw” it. Then, if the other form can be written in the line’s font, the bar says that ş is available and looks close, and Edit > Use Suggested Character (⌃⌘U) types it. Nothing changes unless you choose it, and for Romanian text a ș drawn with a fallback font is usually better than a ş.
PDF Textfix also knows the glyph name trap above: its check of every new glyph accepts a glyph named tcommaaccent as ț as well as ţ, since fonts use that name for ț, so the line’s own ț can be used.
The how-to on changing a name in a PDF walks through the whole edit, and the glossary explains the fallback font and the difference between a glyph and a character.
Which fonts support Romanian diacritics?
For a document you are writing, choose a font that holds ș, ț, Ș, Ț, ă, Ă, â, Â, î and Î, and export the PDF with the text as typed. From the check above, most of the Mac’s standard text faces qualify. Before you send a PDF, test it in a minute: search it for “ș” and “ț” with a viewer’s Find; then type a line with all ten letters into a test document in your font, export it, and zoom in on the commas.
For a PDF you received, the font is what it is. If ș is missing from its subset, any edit must draw the letter from another font; what matters is that the substitute is close and that you can see where it was used.
Questions people ask
Is ş acceptable instead of ș in a Romanian document?
Unicode’s own note says ș should be used for Romanian. Readers notice, and search treats the two as different letters, so a document with ş is harder to find and to check.
Why does ț copy as ţ from my PDF?
Often the font names its glyph tcommaaccent and the file has no explicit map, so the viewer reads the name as the cedilla letter. The page is right; the copy is not. A fresh export from the source usually fixes it.
Can I replace every ş with ș in a PDF at once?
Not with PDF Textfix, which edits one line at a time. For a long document, fix the source and export again; for a few lines, edit each one.