> Is SF particularly bad for German?
Anecdote: For some time San Francisco had the wrong glyph for the German character Capital Sharp S - the „ẞ“.
SF rendered the glyph as a ligature of two combined S letters, you can see this in this screenshot of a Wikipedia page compared to SF in Safari’s UI:
https://imgur.com/6wxr4Rw
Pretty much every other font which included a Capital Sharp S uses a shape which is more similar to the lowercase ß – and there were over time a lot of variation proposed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141024232352/http://www.signog...
For non German speakers: There exists an orthographic rule in German to render the lowercase ß as SS in uppercase in low fidelity environments and sometimes also for line breaks. For some reason English speakers sometimes interpret „ß“ and „ss“ as interchangeable, which is somewhat wrong. But I can see how an English speaking monolinguist tries to optimise things.
Most of the time that orthographic rule works. But it is after all a low fidelity variant, similar how the ü → ue pattern loses some information. To always use an SS ligature robs the reader of discrimination: Is „MASSE“ an uppercase variant of „Masse“ or of „Maße“? That’s particular significant for personal names which should be written exact, even in uppercase. There are reasons why typography introduced an „ẞ“, it then got encoded into Unicode - it fills a small need.
Apple had this wrong glyph in San Francisco from Mac OS El Capitan up until Mojave and elsewhere, including its web sites. It was rather absurd to report this bug to Apple: Radar/Feedback dialogue wasn’t really equipped to report a font bug and secondly both the Feedback reporter and Apple’s developer website used San Francisco at its font, making illustrating the report with glyphs rather annoying. And of course, as usual with bug reports to Apple: You’ll never get feedback.