Bio Ico

Here is another case, which has the same letter show up twice in the same word, once combined and once not.

It is strange, however, that there are times where the letters are combined correctly and times where they are not. In the attached screenshot, I have two letters for whom the diacritics are not combined, and the same two in another word where the diacritics are combined. 

In the uppermost row, the last five letters, from right to left, are: פּלאַטע. (Sounds like "plateh", but not exactly.)

In the lower row, the penultimate word is "פֿאַר" (like the word "far").

They both make use of the same letter אַ, but it would appear as though only in the first row is it counted as two letters. The other circled letters are the "p" sound and the "f" sound (respectively), as mentioned in an earlier comment.

To shed a little light on the topic:

The niqud act as a sort of vowel for the hebrew alphabet. In the hebrew language, these diacritics are often unused. However, in Yiddish, they do show up. They can be either above, in the middle of, or below a letter, and help to distinguish how letters should be pronounced.

Let's take, for example, the letter פ.

In Hebrew, this reads as either a "p" or an "f", depending on context.

In Yiddish, this letter makes a "p" when shown w/o niqud, or when it looks like this:  פּ and an "f" when it looks like this: פֿ. For many keyboards (like the one I'm currently using), these diacritics are separate letters that you type after the letter, so that each one isn't bound to a specific character (since that bar is also used for letters like "v": בֿ). However, in doing this, you sometimes come across fonts and the like that recognize it as wholly separated from its letter, and thus puts it to the side with a circle around it to show where a letter would go. This style makes the language very hard to read.

I would recommend finding a keyboard layout that has the letters with the diacritics attached, rather than one that "combines" them as mentioned above.

Any news on this? 

That is correct. 

The diacritics are called nikkuq/niqud, and are used in yiddish, but not Hebrew.