German sharp S uppercase mapping

[Dominikus Dittes Scherkl]

Am 02.12.24 um 12:25 schrieb Giacomo Catenazzi via Unicode:
> I think you are taking the issue personally, and in a myopic view.
Na, fortunately my name doesn't contain ß, so I really don't care.
But it brings me up that something practically nobody ever needs
_except_ some few people who have legal problems with it, can not be
changed to something that fixes their problem and won't harm anyone
else. And that only because "it has to be stable".

The new letter is there to disentangle two things that were
unnecessarily conflated.

> So you want to break many files? If you change the machine translation,
> you will have conflicting (and possibly disappearing documents), because
> filesystems in Windows (and default in macos) are case insensitive.
No. I want to be able if I have 2 files "Weiß.doc" and "Weiss.doc" on my
system and copy them to windows, to get 2 files "WEIẞ.DOC" and "WEISS.DOC".

But what I get now is 1 file, because the second one overwrites the
first one, as from Windows point of view they both have the same name.
This is awful garbage and should be fixed!

And if you copy a whole drive to windows, would you even recognize that
some files were silently dropped?
If you are lucky, you may get some strange message: "File xy already
exists. Do you want to overwrite it?". But I won't count on it.

>> Especially for security reasons, the casing should be changed - to not
>> lose the "ß" in your name and therefore beeing considered a different
>> person IN YOUR LEGAL DOCUMENTS - the most important identifier of all!
>
> As people said: that it is a different case, which should be handled
> outside the machine translation.
No, this is the only relevant case. Legal documents often use
all-uppercase and thereby garbles names containing ß.
In manual processing you can always choose yourself what letter you want
to use. And if anywhere some ẞ occurs and you don't like it, you are
always free to replace it by SS.
But leaving it there can never be more than an aesthetic problem. On the
other hand the old uppercase can be a serious problem.

> so as other said: it should be put in local casing. In
> Switzerland we do not want such legal distinction.
Swiss doesn't use ß, so there is no problem for them. But I suspect
people going to Switzerland still want their names to be spelled
correct. Maybe the Swiss government doesn't care for this problem, but
it won't hurt them if by accident (changing their sacred default casing)
their systems would no more annoy foreign people, no?

>> Unlike turkish, which has a different uppercase for "i" - which is used
>> differently in pretty much _any_ other latin-script using language, "ß"
>> is not used differently in any other language. It is not used in any
>> other language at all.
 > Switzerland uses it differently.

Yeah, it doesn't use it at all. But then, why should they care what the
uppercase of a letter they don't use is?

How does Switzerland handle foreign names containing ß?

--
                                          Dominikus Dittes Scherkl