> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/vsecs.html
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/secs.html

Otto Stolz wrote on 1998-08-18:
>  In both subsets, the character
>    017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S
> is missing.
>
>  This letter is needed to spell German correctly, when written in Gothic
>  type ("Fraktur", in German) -- even after the recent spelling reform.
>  Gothic type is still used widely for decorative inscriptions (such as
>  labels on food cans and beer bottles, advertisements, inn signs, even
>  bank notes and postal stamps).

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn geschrieben:
> I deliberately left the long s out, because it is very clearly an
> archaic character that is used today in Germany exclusively in
> decorative Fraktur fonts and certainly not in common German writing.

I was implying that Fraktur fonts are currently gaining in popularity; so
it would be wise to take them in account when defining standards that are
meant to last (at least for some decades, I hope).

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> Most Germans would not even recognize a long s in a normal non-Fraktur
> font. (For the record: I am German with a quite good background in
> German typographic conventions.)

You mean: most Germans of your age. I am almost a generation (27¼ years)
older than you are, and I assure you, most Germans of my age read Fraktur
fluently: though we have learned to read Antiqua at elementary school, we
red Defoe, Stevenson, and Karl May mostly in Fraktur, because these copies
were at hand, at that time. Many Germans of my generation also can read
and write German script (though not as fluently as Fraktur type). So, we
will expect long-S in its orthographically proper positions, in Fraktur,
and we will easily recognize it in the same positions, in Antiqua.

Boy, we are still around, and we do definitely not deem ourselves as
"archaic" :-)

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> These were very good reasons to keep the long s out of character sets
> designed for German such as ISO 646, ISO 8859, ISO 6937, CP1252, TeX,
> etc.

Most probably, there were other reasons which do not apply to SECS, VECS,
or MECS (mostly space considerations).

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> Please note that VSECS and SECS are designed for a broad range of
> non-typographical applications. They are NOT primarily intended for
>   - the publishing industry and word processing
>   - linguistic and literary research
>   - archival and processing of historic text

The problem with this sort of subsets is that they will be used even for
purposes their creators were not anticipating.

By way of example, you can easily find PD, or shareware, ISO 8859-1, or
CP 1252, Fraktur fonts -- but they are simply unusable for German, because
both of these code sets do not contain a long-S, so these fonts do not
bother to provide a long-S glyph. (Rather, they contain monstrosities such
as a "Gothic" Yen sign, just because "a Windows font must have it". But I
never, ever, have found a Fraktur font for Windows (the most popular system
around) that would allow correct German spelling!) So, the omission in the
character-set design has desastrous consequences for the applicability of
fonts.

I foresee that MECS-1, SECS, or some such, will become a quasi-standard
for the character repertoire of small text-processing (as opposed to
professional desk-top publishing) applications. As said above, I also
foresee sort of a renascence of the Fraktur type. If I am right, all those
small text-processing applications will be deficient (for the German
language) if the long-S were omitted from the forthcoming European UCS
subset standards.

It are these small text-processing applications, such as designing
business-cards, announcements, posters, diplomas, programme-sheets, or
menus, that will need decorative fonts, such as Fraktur type, or German
script; hence, it is these applications that will need the long-S most.

I do not want to repeat the omission of CP 1252 with the forthcoming
larger character sets.

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> A Fraktur font covering the VSECS and SECS collections would be a rather
> strange product.

I do not mandate this sort of beast.

As you know perfectly well, foreign words are traditionally set in Antiqua,
even if the surrounding German text is set in Fraktur. So a Fraktur font
could have Antiqua-like, or Sans-Serif-like, glyphs for all of those
currency, mathematical, and other special signs.

An antiqua, or a Sans-Serif, MECS, or SECS, font (the sort of fonts SECS
and VECS are aiming at) would simply have *one more glyph*, viz. a long S,
as depicted in the Unicode, and ISO 10646-1, books.

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> Special decorative scripts such as German Fraktur are best kept out of
> the scope of the Multilingual European Subset standard entirely!

Mind you, these standards shall define *character* subsets, not *glyph*
repertoires. If any orthography regularly (significantly, at least) to be
used with them requires a particular character, then it must be included.

The whole argument boils down to the question: will the German orthography,
as required for Fraktur type and German script, be used significantly, so
it should be included in MECS's, or SECS's, scope? I say: YES.

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> In the design of the 8-bit sets, the code size restrictions forced the
> designers to stick with common sense when they tried to select the
> essential characters. The result were sicely small sets where there was
> a reasonable good rationale for most included characters.

For some characters, this is debatable (to say the least).

Am 1998-08-18 hat Markus Kuhn weiter geschrieben:
> With the step to small 16-bit subsets, the restrictions that led to nice
> and simple sets is now gone and we have to be careful not to add too many
> rarely required special purpose characters to even the smallest UCS subset.

On the other hand, we have to be careful not to omit essential characters
which were left out from earlier standards mainly as a result of the
pressing code-space problems.

Am 1998-08-18 hat Michael Everson geschrieben:
> Irish and Welsh characters are not controversial. These characters are
> required by the users of these languages.

Und am 1998-08-18 hat Marion Gunn geschrieben:
> we'd very much like to retain [017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S] for OUR OWN
> use, irrespective of German typographic conventions.

So, there is another good reason to include the long S into MES-1, or SECS
(together with three more R, and S, variants, if I remember correctly).

Best wishes,
   Otto Stolz