Am 1998-11-24 um 4:57 hat Markus Kuhn geschrieben: > Writing text in all caps is a completely alien concept to traditional > German typography. ... > I know of only one exception: International standards require the use of > capital letters in passports, This is generally true, though there is at least one more exception: maps use a plethora of different typographic styles, including all- capitals in both roman and italic variants, to represent all those categories of objects. E. g., a map-maker may choose to label mountains in mixed-case, and highlands in uppercase, from the same font family. Both of these exceptions amount to uppercasing single words, rather than whole sentences, as in, e. g., > DO NOT PUT LIVE ANIMALS INTO MICROWAVE OVEN > I would never emphasise text by capitalizing it, as this de-facto ob- > scures the text for most German readers. This is quite true, and you can even construct examples where capitalizing a sentence will render it ambiguous. Notorious examples are: - ER HAT IN MOSKAU LIEBE GENOSSEN. which could mean either "Er hat ... liebe Genossen" = "At Moskow, he has got dear comrades.", or "Er hat ... Liebe genossen" = "At Moskow, he has enjoyed love." - ER TRINKT DEN WEIN IN MASSEN. which could mean either "Er trinkt den Wein in Maßen" = "He drinks wine, moderately." or "Er trinkt den Wein in Massen" = "He drinks wine, in large quantities." Note that, in both cases, the different meanings correspond to different pronounciations. > It is one of the false myths going around in the i18n community that it > is appropriate to replace ß by SS when capitalizing German words. Still this is an official rule, cf. , which does hold for capitalising -- except in passports, cf. , item 2 in the ordered list. The same rule was valid before the spelling reform (and a different rule, some decades ago - but there hase been a rule for at least half a century). > This is non-sense. The appropriate thing to do is to not capitalize German > words. The appropriate thing to do is not to capitalize German sentences. There are situations where single words, such as names, may be capitalized. For these situations, the ß-SS rule does hold (except in passports). > Both STRAßE and STRASSE are equally ugly and intolerable, and the > latter way of writing it would even change the pronunciation to a > short "a", so STRAßE -- if it really has to be all-caps -- is probably > even the somewhat less ugly alternative. As there is an official rule, this means that the normal sound-letter correspondence for double-S does not hold for capitalized words; rather you have to go back to the normal spelling to learn about the pronounciation. And it means that "STRAßE" is a spelling error. > Die Wahrheit ist irgendwo da draußen: Probably somewhere in the Internet :-) Best wishes, Otto Stolz