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Comment by boomlinde | Hacker News Reader

German has an 'ß' problem of a similar nature. There is a corresponding capital "ẞ" in Unicode, and Germany has officially adopted 'ẞ' as an alternative since, but in Unicode's SpecialCasing.txt the upper of 'ß' is still 'SS'. The lower of 'S' of course being 's', there's no going back after folding to upper cases. Lower of 'ẞ' is however still 'ß'.

So by alternating case you end up with ß→SS→ss or ẞ→ß→SS. Certainly has potential to screw with naive attempts at case-insensitive comparison via case folding. Then again, Unicode adopting 'ẞ' as the upper of 'ß' in some future version would probably only increase that potential further.

I'm interested to hear from people dealing with a lot of German text how much of a problem this is in practice.

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There is an esthetic issue here too.

The ‘ß’ is a ligature of the old ‘long s’ [1] which was written ‘ſ’ (because it’s common in old texts there is a Unicode code point for it).

This letter has no upper case version. Capitalized words starting with a long ‘ſ’ always used ‘S’.

Now in German language, to make this lowercase long ‘ſ’ a sharp ‘s’, ‘ſ’ followed by ‘z’ was written: ‘ſz’.

And these two were often typeset as a ligature, ‘ß’, for esthetic reasons.

That ligature then became the common case and eventually a letter recognized in German-speaking countries.

As a hypothetic analogy, imagine a ‘ll’ ligature, as in ‘fallacy’, becoming an English letter – by some twist of history.

As we saw, these were lowercase letters. And there is no uppercase version of ‘ſ’.

So the uppercase ‘ẞ’ that is now official recognized and has a Unicode code point should not look like this.

It's an absolute eye saw because all that was done was somehow make the letter look a bit more like a capital.

But it's nature of being two lowercase letters, originally, still makes it stand out like an eye sore for people with a background in typography, like myself.

IMHO It should look like ‘SZ’ (or ‘SS’), made into a ligature.

And as a type designer, I'd either refrain from filling that code point in a font I design, to protest this, or do the above: create a ligature of ‘SZ’ or ‘SS’ (alternative) and put that there.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

I disagree with roughtly all of this.

First of all, 'ß' was a ligature -- a long time ago. It is a letter today. Disassembling it according to its original construction makes no sense today for any kind of argument about typesetting or Unicode. Further, 'ſ' is not used today in German at all, except for meta discussions like this or to stress how things used to be spelled. It makes no sense to mention it unless you are talking about font design or historic use of German (and other languages, for that matter).

Also, if you do mention it for the sake of talking about font design, in Latin fonts, 'ſs' is actually the basis for the design of 'ß', not 'ſz' -- that was mainly done in Blackletter/Fraktur when the 'z' looked different, maybe a bit like 'ʒ' (I used Unicode's'ezh' here hoping it looks right) so that old style 'ß' looks like a ligature of 'ſʒ'. This can still be seen occasionally, e.g., on Berlin street name signs. It is obsolete for most fonts today (although I quite like it).

Moreover, there is an upper case letter for 'ß': 'ẞ'. And it has existed in fine typology way before being adopted into Unicode. Actually, it's existence was probably the reason why it is now in Unicode. The official German rules are now: either use 'SS' or 'ẞ' for uppercase 'ß'. Most Germans probably do not even know that 'ẞ' exists as a choice today, although it was used on 'DER GROẞE DUDEN' even before Unicode existed.

And finally, how a glyph is designed is not necessarily decided on whether historic parts of an ancient ligature had upper case variants. So that 'ſ' has no upper case equivalent is irrelevant for both Unicode and type design.

But as a font designer or anything else, you can protest. No problem. Everyone has the right to protest. But please don't spill the Internet with wrong information, as there is enough of it already.

And I don't think 'SS'<->'ß' is similar to the Turkish 'I with/without dot' problem, because the default Unicode mapping for 'ß' is correct in all languages, while the Turkish (and also Azerbaijani) problem is correct or broken depending on language setting. This is way more problematic because an assumed universal equivalence does not hold. And you need to carefully distinguish whether a string is language specific or not, e.g., path names or IDs in data bases, etc.

Indeed, the original Unicode inclusion request justifies the need for an encoding for the character by referencing prior usage going back all the way to 1879: https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n3227.pdf

It may be a typographical abomination, but it's an intentional representation of that particular typographical abomination, just as the ox head in "A" intentionally has its horns pointing down.

> And I don't think 'SS'<->'ß' is similar to the Turkish 'I with/without dot' problem, because the default Unicode mapping for 'ß' is correct in all languages, while the Turkish (and also Azerbaijani) problem is correct or broken depending on language setting.

I don't know if this counts as "correct" but it's still very confusing.

  >>> "ß".upper()
  'SS'
  >>> "ß".upper().lower()
  'ss'

  >>> "ẞ".lower()
  'ß'
  >>> "ẞ".lower().upper()
  'SS'
  >>> "ẞ".lower().upper().lower()
  'ss'

Yes, it's definitely weird. But it is independent of locale, so any programmer has a change to notice this regardless of language setting, instead of their app failing only once it is used by someone from Turkey or Azerbaijan.

"tja".

now Unicode philosophers have to ponder a breaking change vs introducing a new, duplicate ß code point LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S WITH CAPITAL SHARP S which as upper case has encoded the proper ẞ

two red buttons meme here...

> It's an absolute eye saw

I assume you mean "eyesore"

Eye saw is even gorier, I like it.

This is quite possibly a mondegreen.

migraine?? lol TIL Lady Mondegreen. made may day. thank you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

Eye saw must be related to eye poke.

U+07E6 probably should be rendered as exactly like “SS” (not a ligature, and as a double-width character in monospace fonts). Inventing a separate glyph for it seems a bit silly and only hinders adoption. Even if it's a ligature like §, that issue won't go away. And there are design choices that are even worse than § due to historic precedent.

> As a hypothetic analogy, imagine a ‘ll’ ligature, as in ‘fallacy’, becoming an English letter – by some twist of history.

You could instead consider 'W', a non-hypothetical case of just that. Would you similarly abandon current English orthography in your font design in defense of some historical trivia?

This is discussed in the Unicode Core Spec documentation here (and the Turkish "i" above):

https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/cha...

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