Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 19:55:24 +0000
Hans Meiser <brille1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I see.
> 
> Yet, the u+1E9E doesn't quite look like two capital "S". So any
> program implementing a conversion conforming to Unicode will
> currently display/print in a wrong result: "MAßE" instead of the
> correctly converted result "MASSE".

While the default simple uppercasing of "maße" will yield "MAßE", the
default full uppercasing will yield "MASSE".

I am not aware of a useful definition of 'conforming to Unicode' that
applies to either transformation.

> Both would be correctly encoded
> as u+004D u+0041 u+1E9E u+0045. Yet, AFAIK, the current glyph would
> currently be considered an error.
> 
> Proposal: Shouldn't the glyph be amended to match the natural
> language?

No, the glyph corresponds to *a* natural form of German, as opposed to
Standard German - which some would argue was not a natural language!
Now, it may be argued that U+00DF has the same glyph as U+1E9E when
next to a capital letter, but that is a font decision, not a Unicode
decision.

One could therefore define an uppercasing transformation that was a
conformant Unicode process, and agreed with default uppercasing on NFD
strings except for U+00DF, but differed by mapping U+00DF to U+1E9E.
One might not notice any error in the printed output of this process,
any more than one would notice U+006F LATIN SMALL LETTER O being
transformed to U+041E CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER O.

Richard.