Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

On 12/10/2015 2:45 AM, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:
> Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
>> A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in
>> French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written
>> without accents.
> Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française)

They actually mandate "Académie *f*rançaise". And "Imprimerie
*n*ationale" (for Philippe; even if imprimerienationale.fr has forgotten
that).

> has always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the
> school teachers teach the other way, and accents on capital letters
> was technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard),

Thanks to gallica.fr and archive.org, it is easy to see what actually
happened until the middle of the 20th century. What I have seen is that
in both cold and hot metal, until the end of the 19th century, one only
and always sees É È Ê Ë Ç Œ Æ; on small caps, one can sometime find À Â
Ô Ù. That matches all the descriptions of the "casse parisienne" and
"police" (how many "a", "b", "c", etc in a font) I have seen in
typography manuals. Around the beginning of the 20th century, one start
to see books without accented capitals (and unfortunately books with
inconsistent use of the accented capitals).

Eric.
Received on Fri Dec 11 2015 - 01:21:18 CST