From: Gerd Schumacher (Gerd-Schumacher@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2005 - 17:55:53 CST
Some more remarks on the Eszett from the German point of view:
In my opinion every single statement of Otto Stolze`s fairly comprehensive
mail today is absolutely correct.
Using the Eszett in capitalization is neither common sense nor is it allowed
in the official orthography of the German speaking countries. It is still
just a kind of double s, as it was used for example by Aldus Manutius 500
years ago to print Latin.
The typographers, who tried to introduce a capital Eszett, did not succeed.
It is mainly a matter of orthography, not of typography.
Of course, there are some false capital Eszetts in minor typesetting, but
for sure most of them are produced by somewhat poorly literate people's text
processors. I remember to have seen the first ones some 25 years ago, when
digital typesetting was introduced. Possibly the situation is a bit
different in the former GDR.
I don't believe, a x-high small capital form was ever used. I haven't seen
any at all. It would look odd enough, that I cannot imagine, that even
those people, who use the Eszett in „normal“ capitalization, would accept
it.
Encoding a capital Eszett would cause problems similar to encoding the A – F
as hex numbers, which also has been rejected for good reasons.
Gerd
ps.: What about a capital long s? ;-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Feb 17 2005 - 17:56:52 CST