It's the same logistics as an American thinking twice before naming their baby with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's a foreign language that will probably not play well with domestic systems.
Open the document in the wrong application, and the text will be interspeded with ∆ and °, or ® and▯in the places of all the non-English characters, with no obvious way to fix the encoding.
The most robust solution would be that each document-showing application had a dialog showing how the text is displayed in all the supported codesets at once, allowing the user to choose the right one. Instead, we get config options buried deep in the menu, showing endless lists of cryptic options, forcing the user to try then one by one. It's frustrating to know that the correct configuration is one click away, but having no idea which one is the right option.
Mmmmmhhh... That gives me an idea for an app...
It got much better in the last years as UTF-8 gained wider adoption. The problems are mostly with legacy systems in government. (Cannot comment on that since my name fits in ASCII.)
Using desktop applications is still a nightmare, where opening any document from the internet or navigating to a foreign page is hit or miss.
Also, the main frustration is not that it happens often; it's that when you encounter it, fixing it may involve studying the whole software stack to find out where the setting is switched or at what point in the toolchain the format was mishandled.
I don't know, maybe it's me who's doing something wrong and turn to using only a small subset of software tools, properly configured?
But I do need to process documents from many origins using a variety of different tools; I've never found a good programable multimedia editor that satisfies all my needs (something like emacs but with WYSIWIG capabilities).
It also often happens with pages in Chinese or Japanese. But then you bring another problem: when a document is shown as a list full of ▯▯▯▯▯▯,▯▯-.▯▯▯, there's no way to tell if the problem is with the encoding or the fonts, and no obvious way to know which font should be installed and what part of the software stack is the one responsible.
The whole field of displaying documents to end users could benefit from some user-centered design to build tools that helped users to fix these situations, based on some common heuristics to solve the most frequent problems.
[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1871...
I've known a few people called Zoë (enough now that I still know the alt-0235 short-code for it on windows), and inevitably on their licenses the omit the diaeresis above their name.
It's really a version of Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names[1] writ-large, by government.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
One argument people mentioned (though I have no idea whether it has any validity) is that if you have the diacritic on the birth certificate then it's easy to drop it later, or not use it in practice, but the other direction would be harder to justify.
As an aside, one can indeed simply change one's name whenever one likes and start going by a new name, so long as it's not for fradulent purposes. One is advised to get some kind of documentary name-changing paperwork, and getting a passport etc in your new name will require that paperwork.
For example, the (quite common) name Юрий has been transliterated as Yuriy, Yurij, Yurii, Yuri, Juriy, Jurij or even other options.
Also, you can't transliterate from Cyrillic, you can transliterate from a particular language, since any phonetic transliterations will be slightly different between, for example, Russian and Ukrainian - even ISO 9 accounts for that, so a sequence of letters without context can't be sufficient for transliteration, the exact same sequence of cyrillic letters may have to be transliterated differently depending on its language.
There are situations in which you have to transliterate, rather than transcribe, because you don't know what language it is. For example, it's a name in a list of names of people from different places.
Aside: The inverse problem is also funny: when you have a Latin name, it's hard to tell how it's supposed to be pronounced. When one wants to transliterate it into Cyryllic, one would wish to preserve pronounciation. This causes some names to be transliterated in many different ways, depending on the transliterator's opinion of the correct pronunciation of the original name.
And of course choosing the standard Cyrillic-alphabet language