From: Karl Pentzlin (karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 13:28:26 CST
Am Freitag, 4. Mai 2007 um 20:28 schrieb John Hudson:
JH> But the uppercase eszett could very easily be a
JH> ligature of <S ZWJ S>
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. 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).
On the other hand, if Unicode would standardize <S ZWJ S> to be
interpreted as uppercase-ß, it would introduce this letter "through
the backdoor" together with a change of the semantics of ZWJ. There
is no need to encode the uppercase-ß otherwise than usual: giving it a
code point.
The uppercase-ß is a different character from a ligature of two "S",
alone by the fact that the sets of the possible glyphs are definitely
different, even if there may be a small intersection of this sets.
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.
- Karl Pentzlin
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