Systems can be very outdated, yet still in use.

Before I retired from worrying about such things, I occasionally would run across a production system dependent on some 20-year-old Macintosh or dust-covered Windows PC doing mysterious business-critical tasks, running software from some long-bankrupt vendor, set up by some long-gone production manager. You would be amazed.

I don't keep up with the AP stylebook these days, but I think it calls for diacritics in romance languages and German -- but with no guarantee those marks will survive the trip to print.

Modernizing systems is not high on the priority list when your industry is going down in flames. On the other hand, the radical centralization of printed newspaper editing and production is sending a lot of old workflows to the grave, so there's hope for fans of diacritics.

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