On Sat, 18 Jul 1998, Michael Everson wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure I have also seen, on this very list, citations for the
> >uppercase sharp s character. Is it not in anyone's sights for inclusion?
>
> I'd certainly support it. It would solve some problems very neatly. I
> myself have actually seen a capital sharp s in print. A nice response to
> automatic capitalization which leaves a small sharp S in the middle of a
> capitalized word (MAßSTAB). It had a flat top and a kind of serif. It was
> neat.
Well, this is a difficult topic. Basically, an uppercase sharp s is
nonsense (people in Switzerland live happily without a sharp s at all).
And there is a lot of software (at least TeX :-) which can handle
uppercasifying correctly.
[A similar nonsense is to write the male and female forms at the same time
of a word with an uppercase `I' in it, e.g. StudentInnen = Studenten and
Studentinnen -- but this is politically correct, so to say.]
Nevertheless, the language is never fixed, and the tendency to have an
uppercase sharp s is evident. Unfortunately, most fonts don't have an
uppercase sharp s, and the lowercase sharp s usually looks extremely ugly
amidst uppercase letters.
The famous German dictionary from the Grimm brothers (started in 1876 or
so) have neither used a sharp s (they use `sz') nor capitalized words in
the middle of the sentence. They even have written Göthe of Goethe :-)
Personally, I would prefer a Unicode character `uppercase sharp s' which
can get any appearance...
Werner
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