Re: Uppercase ß is coming? (U+1E9E)

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2007 - 06:59:56 CST

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    On 03/05/07, Adam Twardoch <list.adam@twardoch.com> wrote:
    >
    > I find most of these design proposals structurally flawed -- they don't
    > look like uppercase letters. They look like lowercase letters enlarged
    > to match uppercase. The graphical structure of the Roman uppercase is
    > very different from lowercase. If one were to invent a new uppercase
    > letter, it would have to stylistically match the Roman uppercase. If
    > Unicode really decides to encode uppercase ß, type designers should
    > imagine what the uppercase ß would have looked from the very beginning,
    > rather than trying to work out of the existing lowercase ß form.
    >
    > I have drafted some proposals these, but these are not very successful
    > either:
    > http://www.typeforum.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=XForum&file=viewthread&page=2&tid=353#pid1219
    >
    > My own view, using another diacritic letter, Scedilla (U+015E, Åž), would
    > be most appropriate for denoting uppercase ß.
    >

    The character was proposed in order to represent existing typographic
    practice, not as an orthographic innovation. As can be seen from the
    numerous examples provided in the proposal document
    <http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3227.pdf>, the character is
    basically an enlarged version of the lowercase letter. You may not
    like it, but that is (for better or for worse) what people have been
    using, and that is what the proposed character is intended to
    represent -- not an S-cedilla or anything else.

    > However, the general question is: if U+1E9E is added to Unicode, will
    > the casing rules be changed so that ß (U+00DF) uppercases to U+1E9E by
    > default?

    No. Read the proposal.

    Andrew



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