From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 14:36:30 CST
Karl Pentzlin wrote:
> No. A <S ZWJ S> leaves the interpretation of the ligature to the font
> designer. There is no mechanism which ensures a sequence being
> interpreted as an uppercase-ß.
Support for the uppercase eszett glyph is going to be dependent on the font developers no
matter how it is implemented. Users are going to need to use fonts that support this
glyph, and whether they support it as a distinct character or as a specified ligature
treatment (just like required ligatures for Arabic and other scripts) is largely immaterial.
> In fact, there may already exist fonts
> which interpret the <S ZWJ S> a beautiful ligature of two capital S,
> which may be appropriate at places where the use of an uppercase-ß
> is not wanted (e.g. because in lowercase, the ß would be wrong at that
> place).
I consider this quite a minor concern, not only because the number of such fonts in
existence must be very small but also because the same basic observation applies: you need
to use an appropriate font.
> JH> ... the typesetter ...
> JH> and his actions if he finds that the copy calls for a
> JH> character that he does not have in his tray of type.
> Like é may be written e if only 7-bit ASCII characters are available.
> This does not prove é and e being glyph variants of the same character.
But the reader would read e as an error in place of é. He would not read SS as an error in
place of the uppercase eszett, because orthographically the SS is correct and the latter
is a glyph variant of it.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com We say our understanding measures how things are, and likewise our perception, since that is how we find our way around, but in fact these do not measure. They are measured. -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
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