From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu May 10 2007 - 15:48:28 CDT
Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> OTOH, I'm not a German-speaker or reader, and I confess that 90% of the
> time when I see ß, it's the "B" circuits in my brain that fire first. So
> my opinion probably shouldn't be relied upon (and indeed, very likely
> should be ridiculed heartily).
It's quite normal for a non-German speaker, to see a B or beta, but given
the context (lowercase Latin text, both options are immediately cancelled).
However, in a all-capitals context, we can't reliably keep the lowercase
form which looks too much like a capital B; some better hint is needed and
the best way is to not only avoid the vertical line on the left (something
already done for the lowercase esszett), but also revert the yogh or
esh-like assimilation that occurred when the modern esszett form was
adopted.
Using Z will not be helpful for modern usage (despite of the German name of
the character which remains and contrasts with the modern interpretation as
"doppelt Ess"), so it just remains S as the best visual hint (but we need to
remove a part of both left and right components of the glyph to avoid
confusions.)
I won't speak about other traditional or decorative font styles that may
adopt any other form, but with caveats when rendering something else than
German or languages with basic Latin alphabets and very few extension base
letters. If a language still has Yogh or Ezh, those alternatives will create
confusions.
As Unicode representative glyphs should be locale-neutral, as much as
possible, something really distinct should be selected as the primary glyph;
a German-language renderer could still use the Ezh-based variant, either by
direct selection with a variant selector, or though language hints given to
the renderer (but for multilanguage documents, this will still be a problem,
notably if German proper names are inserted in non-German documents, this
usage being the most convincing reason why one will insist on encoding the
esszet explicitly, and making the distinction very clear, even within
uppercase titles.)
Philippe.
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