From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 13:40:20 CST
Andrew West wrote:
> Have you read the proposal ? The character is being proposed in order
> to represent examples of usage in existing texts -- whether you like
> it or not some people have used an uppercase form of the letter, and
> there is a need to represent texts which use this uppercase form.
Someone might make a similar argument for small caps (for several scripts)
- which have plenty of "usage in existing texts" and, in good fonts,
are not identical to "scaled down" capital letters.
This looks to me to be little different from a "large lower case"
letter ß. Granted it is not be identical to a scaled up ß, but
is the difference any more significant than than that between
true upper case letters and small caps? (The fact that some of the
samples in the proposal have a descender "tail" as opposed to
an ascender on the lower case form seems to be a matter of style
to make it look more harmonious with upper case letters.)
There may be a need to represent this, but several other ways
this could be done have already been suggested. I guess the
question is, is there any real need to represent this as a
separate character in _plain_ text?
The arguments for "special tasks like branding, shop-signing" carry
little weight since those applications are essentially rich text, or
even parts of logos.
The case for book titles and personal names is more
relevant, since one there may be database applications where
personal names or book titles are all in upper case. Names on
ID cards, name tags or mailing labels are sometimes all upper
case. But even in these instances the argument is not
entirely convincing and there are alternate solutions.
Will encoding this character genuinely solve more problems
than it will create?
- Chris
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