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Comment by AdrianoKF | Hacker News Reader

Small nitpick: uppercase ẞ was added to Unicode 5.1 in 2007 (https://unicode-table.com/en/1E9E/) and is considered correct German orthography since 2017 (see §25 E3 in https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6180#par25E3)

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How often do you see the new letter in German everyday life? Despite being German myself I don't visit Germany that often these days, I still read a couple of German publications regularly. I have never seen the new letter outside of discussions by software people about character handling.

I do sometimes, but I'm rather sensitive for the ẞ issue: My last name contains an ß and uppercasing would either mean keeping the ß lowercase – the Personalausweis does that (†) and it looks ugly — or doing the ß → SS transformation which is somewhat forbidden in identity documents; a name must be exact. Hence, someday in the future, hopefully, the ẞ. While personal names were a major motivation for the inclusion of the ẞ into Unicode, I’m always happy to see it in the wild in press or book titles or such.

† Although it’s Germany and of course there exists an obscure Verwaltungsvorschrift according to which you can write the non-machine readable field of the Personalausweis/Pass in lowercase, exactly for this use case. I didn’t know that last time but I fully intend to make some poor civil servants life a slight hell the next time I have to renew.

I assumed it was added for shop signs and product packaging (I.e. as a gimmick).

Speaking of surviving Fraktur ligatures, I’m sorry that a couple of others like tz didn’t make it to Roman. It makes poor ß appear lonely.

I was actually wondering if the driving factor is legal documents. ID cards show names in all-caps letters, which creates the dilemma that your ID might not show your actual name (notwithstanding international standards for travel documents that prescribe transliteration of non-latin characters; see ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3, section 6 [0] for examples)

[0]: https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en....

That’s a good theory, especially as section 3.1 of that ICAO document explicitly permits the use of ß.

Bringing the thread back to the topic of this comment section: the ICAO document also calls the digits 0123456789 “Arabic” even though their shapes are closer to the original Hindi (Devanagari) forms than to actual Arabic digits — another “Hindi/Turkey” situation

That is correct and solves the roundtrip-problem (in this case and language). But uppercase 'ẞ' is just an additional option at the discretion of the writer, the recommended variant continues to be 'SS'.

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