German sharp S uppercase mapping
Asmus Freytag
asmusf at ix.netcom.com
Sun Dec 1 23:25:35 CST 2024
On 12/1/2024 2:24 PM, David Starner via Unicode wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 1, 2024 at 3:42 PM Markus Scherer <markus.icu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> No, that one is clearly a lowercase ß.
> I disagree; that's clearly an eszett, between other uppercase
> characters, and unless there's some linguistic weirdness going on,
> like iPhone or eBook, that's a capital letter.
No, it's not.
> Glyphs have to be taken
> in context, and in that case, it's clear they didn't intend for one
> character in the middle of the word to be lowercase.
That (writing a lowercase ß in ALLCAPS) being / having been an
acceptable fallback, you can't assume anything based on context. You do
need to consider the glyph (unless you have access to the underlying
text buffer).
> I could wonder
> whether that's a bad glyph for the text, or one used by preference to
> the ẞ style glyph, but in Latin-script German, in a modern Unicode
> context, it makes no sense to maintain a distinction between an
> uppercased lowercase ß and an uppercase ẞ. Uppercase("ß") should go to
> "SS" or "ẞ", and a glyph looking like ß in an uppercase context should
> be interpreted and written as U+1E9E, not U+00DF.
The glyph is clearly not that for a capital letter - for one, it extends
above the tops of all other capitals. Typical designs for capital forms
of ß tend to be wider and a bit more squat in appearance. The
distinction is quite noticeable.
What you are arguing is that one should not use that fallback any
longer. I have no arguments with that, but in this case, the fallback
was used.
A./
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