Re: Hentaigana proposal

[Markus Scherer]

Dear Mr. Tranter,

I can't tell whether you intend to start a discussion on this discussion
mailing list, or intend to submit feedback on a proposal. Maybe you are
looking for discussion before you formalize your feedback.

If you do intend to submit feedback, then, once you have formulated a
position, please use http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html

Please make it very clear in your feedback what documents you are referring
to, what you think should be changed, and why. I suggest you put your
important points first, background later.

(I got a bit lost in your narrative about likes and dislikes; I don't think
this narrative format would be successful as feedback to the
time-constrained technical committee.)

Best regards,
markus

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Leo Broukhis]

This prompts a question: for case conversion bijectivity in fr_FR
locale, should there be "invisible accents"? E.g.
déjà -> DE(combining invisible acute accent)JA(combining invisible
grave accent) -> déjà
whereas in fr_CA locale, it is simply
déjà -> DÉJÀ -> déjà

Leo

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 9:35 PM, Marc Blanchet  wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2015, at 23:32, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>
> On 2015/12/10 09:30, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
> I remember when we went through all this the first time around, encoding
> ẞ in the first place. People were saying "But the Duden says no!!!" And
> someone then pointed out, "Please close your Duden and cast your gaze
> upon ITS FRONT COVER, where you will find written in inch-high capitals
> plain as day, "DER GROẞE DUDEN"
> (http://www.typografie.info/temp/GrosseDuden.jpg) So in terms of
> prescription vs description, the Duden pretty much torpedoes itself.
>
> This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many other
> contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters
> in French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written
> without accents.
>
> while in Québec, upper-case letters are written with accents. l10n…
>
> Marc.
>
> When working on internationalization, it's always good to keep eyes open and
> not just only follow the rules.
>
> However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the picture is
> clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I checked with "Der
> Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found had the officially
> correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember that when the upper-case
> sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, source material showed that it
> was somewhat popular quite some time ago (possibly close in age with the old
> Duden picture). So we would have to go back and check the book in the
> picture to see what it says about ß to be able to claim that Duden was (at
> some point in time) inconsistent with itself.
>
> Regards, Martin.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Marc,

On 2015/12/10 14:35, Marc Blanchet wrote:


This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many
other contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on
upper-case letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case
letters are written without accents.


while in Québec, upper-case letters are written _with_ accents. l10n…


They are written with accents also quite often in France, but the French 
just don't notice :-).


Regards,   Martin.

Aw: Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Jörg Knappen]

Since the captial sharp s is easily available to the public, I see it popping up everywhere in

German publications, mostly in an all caps environment. I have a small collection of it (on paper).

 

The use of the capital sharp s in German is not only a historical artefact, it is recent and modern.

 

--Jörg Knappen

 

Martin Dürst wrote:



However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I checked
with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found had the
officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember that when the
upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, source material
showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time ago (possibly close
in age with the old Duden picture). So we would have to go back and
check the book in the picture to see what it says about ß to be able to
claim that Duden was (at some point in time) inconsistent with itself.

Regards, Martin.
 

Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Andreas Stötzner]

Am 10.12.2015 um 08:57 schrieb Jörg Knappen:

> The use of the capital sharp s in German is not only a historical artefact, 
> it is recent and modern.

some illustrations for that:
https://www.facebook.com/versaleszett/?fref=ts



Mit freundlichen Grüßen –

Andreas Stötzner






___

Andreas Stötzner  Gestaltung Signographie Fontentwicklung
 
Haus des Buches 
Gerichtsweg 28, Raum 434
04103 Leipzig
0176-86823396

In Memoriam--Michael Kaplan

[Lisa Moore]

As was announced earlier on Unicode email lists, the many people 
associated with the Unicode Consortium were much saddened to hear of the 
passing of Michael Kaplan. Please find this posting on our website at: 
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/memoriam.html#Michael_S_Kaplan

Lisa

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

Actually, MS Word offers an option to keep or drop accents when converting 
lower case to upper case in its spell checker options. I comprehend to the 
Turkish translation. They've got two different letter "i", one with and one 
without the dot ("ı"). But that's all not pointing to the direction of what I'm 
up to.

I'm not suggesting to change the Unicode table. The table is fine.

What I'm suggesting is to change the glyph (the rendered outcome) to something 
that's resembling two capital letters "S".

Here's a hyperlink to an image depicting of what I'm suggesting:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9zifh1imef0re9/SS.png

So, no matter whether the glyph will change - the rules and algorithms will be 
retained.

It's quite like Richard (Wordingham) wrote yesterday: "It's a font decision, 
not a Unicode decision". Yet, Unicode needs to lead the way so font designers 
may then amend their fonts accordingly.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Gerrit Ansmann]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 11:19:36 +0100, Hans Meiser  wrote:


After all, the "ß" is just a ligature of "ss" (or, to be precise: a ligature of "sz", originating 
from old German fonts - see hyperlink below), so I suggest the rendered outcome of the capital "ß" to be just the same: 
A ligature of two capital "S".


It’s not that simple. Briefly:

• The ß has completed its transition from a ligature to a standalone letter at 
least hundred years ago. For example, in fraktur typesetting (or more 
precisely, typesetting with a long s), one spelt “ſzeniſch” and “laſziv” – not 
“ßeniſch” and “laßiv”.

• History is not necessarily a good argument at how things should be done, 
otherwise we would have to be VVRITINC LIKE THIS.

• As already mentioned, from readability’s point of view, a properly designed 
capital ß is less obstrusive than SS.

For more details, see the links in my first reply, in particular 
http://j.mp/versaleszett.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

After all, the "ß" is just a ligature of "ss" (or, to be precise: a ligature of 
"sz", originating from old German fonts - see hyperlink below), so I suggest 
the rendered outcome of the capital "ß" to be just the same: A ligature of two 
capital "S".

Here's a hyperlink to an old German font (notice the lower case "s" and "z"):
http://www.myfont.de/fonts/infos/5602-Koch-Fette-Deutsche-Schrift.html

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Frédéric Grosshans]

Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in 
French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written 
without accents.
Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française) has 
always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the school 
teachers teach the other way, and accents on capital letters was 
technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard), so 
many people think the official recommendation is to drop them, and that 
is anyway complicated. But I often get question from non technical 
people on how I type É, œ, or Œ, which shows that they are natural.


(French language Wikipedia has more details on this 
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_des_majuscules_en_fran%C3%A7ais , 
including the fact that the rules in Switzerland are different.)


Frédéric

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Marcel Schneider]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 11:45:22 +0100, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:

>Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
>> A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in 
>> French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written 
>> without accents.

We are welcome to look up the most official website of France:

http://www.elysee.fr/

We learn that *actually* uppercase letters are diacriticized. But the footer 
shows that by the time, diacritics were cut away. 
The change is on-going, from "caps always undiacriticized" to "all-caps 
diacriticized and titlecase caps undiacriticized" and further to "always 
diacriticized" as recommended in one of the 'official' options.

>Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française) has 
>always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the school 
>teachers teach the other way, 

That is old school. Actual school books teach to always diacriticize the 
diacriticized letters, stating that there is strictly *no* rule not to do so. 
But admittingly, switching from old school to new school isn't really 
straigtforward.

>and accents on capital letters was 
>technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard), 

Right, it was. Keyboard: This is why last year, the government placed an order 
for a complete computer keyboard layout at the French Standards body. Making 
such a keyboard layout easy to use, that's the challenge today. It's lastly 
been addressed (but that's not yet official).

>so many people think the official recommendation is to drop them, and that 
>is anyway complicated. But I often get question from non technical 
>people on how I type É, œ, or Œ, which shows that they are natural.

Many people dislike accents on capitals, and they really avoid them. But they 
grow fewer and fewer. Most people like the accents and are eager to place them. 
(Guess I'm a part of.) For everybody to see how to, and how important it is, 
here is one more fine website (in French):

http://accentuez.mon.nom.free.fr/


Related to the thread's subject, there is a beta feedback item I sent by the 
time, but it was buried in a mass of other beta feedback. May I recall it here, 
to look whether some part could be useful?

On this page: http://www.unicode.org/review/pri297/feedback.html, we find:

There is further a point I got unfortunately not sooner aware of. 
It’s about uppercasing of the German ß. Looking at the properties 
of U+00DF in ucdxml.nounihan.flat.xml, I found that uc="0053 0053"
only. In the meantime, German usage begins to shift towards 1E9E, 
as I already reported and suggested updating the NamesList and 
Code Charts annotation for this character. IMO there should be 
an applications Settings checkbox: “☑ ẞ as uppercase for ß”. 
I don’t know if it’s already implemented. However, since U+1E9E 
is now a part of most current fonts and is on keyboard thanks 
to the new German standard layouts, defining uppercase as uc="1E9E" 
might seem appropriate to avoid loosing the ß in text files. 
If the custom setting requires uppercasing U+00DF to double U+0053, 
the cf="0073 0073" value can be used to perform that.

To understand the issue, it is necessary to remember that 
the uppercase latin letter SZ has been created and encoded 
on behalf of the German Standards body DIN to ensure that 
personal data are correctly stored and rendered. As in German, 
the ß is a distinctive part of orthography and is needed in names 
(if a person’s name is Straßer or STRAẞER, writing STRASSER or 
STRASZER is false because these are other names, equally borne),
not having an uppercase ß made much trouble and lead to some 
confusion. Today, fortunately this time is past, and 
the char props may be updated. All what is needed is already 
in the UCD except the new uppercase as a value of the uc property 
for U+00DF.

Therefore I suggest that Unicode takes advice from 
the German Standards body (DIN) whether to set 
this property to its new value. 

[/quote]

Best regards,

Marcel 

Re: Aw: Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
Bing is pathetic. It treats the letter as if it didn't exist

Google maps it to the lowercase, neither allows you to find sites
that use just that character.

A./
  

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Philippe Verdy]

2015-12-10 5:32 GMT+01:00 Martin J. Dürst :

> This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many other
> contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case
> letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are
> written without accents. When working on internationalization, it's always
> good to keep eyes open and not just only follow the rules.
>

Please define "officially". If you consider the official French Academy,
capitals MUST carry their accents. And most official institutions strongly
support accents (inclucing the Imprimerie Nationale in its official
typographic recomandations: it is the official printer of official
publications for almost all national institutions, including all legal
texts).

Do you have any single example of capitals without accents? I know there
are other commendations by private or semi-private companies but only for
limited scopes of use: "La Poste" for addresses on envelops (where you
theoretically also must use any punctuation,including hyphens, commas,
abbreviating dots, but where you also have to use abreviations in many
cases for city names and street names). La Poste is not really an official
lingusitic institution, its needs there are only for printed address
labels. And La Poste is no longer a monopole in France for postal services,
other private postal services have their own recommandations and don't care
about the historic recommandations made by La Poste.

There are other recommandations used in various databases (e.g. the FANTOIR
database made by municipalities and the French casatre for fiscal
purposes), but the scope of use is not really for the French language
itself, but for simple searches in that database. Here again there's no
lowercase letters, and accents are frequently omitted. This is in fact a
legacy inherited after several decenials of use of computers on systems
that initially had no support of Unicode, and when many systems used
various incompatible charsets, frequently undocumented: in those databses,
basic ASCII still rules, but there are more modern formats adding other
fields with more exact distinctions of case and accents.

Even before computers, the French typewriters had capitals with accents.
Accents started disapearing in the 1970's with modern computers,
unfortuantely using softwares made in US and ignoring the French
requirements. Accents are back today, but still not on French keyboards for
PC, due to lack of support in default keyboard layouts (notably on
Windows): they are present on virtual keyboards for smartphones, on
keyboards for Mac, on layouts for Linux.

Only Microsoft is very late on restoring accents on a supported layouts for
Windows (it would then convince keyboard manufacturers to restore the
missing accents on the keycaps).

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Eric Muller]

On 12/10/2015 2:45 AM, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:

Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in 
French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written 
without accents.
Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française) 


They actually mandate "Académie *f*rançaise".  And "Imprimerie 
*n*ationale" (for Philippe; even if imprimerienationale.fr has forgotten 
that).


has always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the 
school teachers teach the other way, and accents on capital letters 
was technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard),


Thanks to gallica.fr and archive.org, it is easy to see what actually 
happened until the middle of the 20th century. What I have seen is that 
in both cold and hot metal, until the end of the 19th century, one only 
and always sees É È Ê Ë Ç Œ Æ; on small caps, one can sometime find À  
Ô Ù. That matches all the descriptions of the "casse parisienne" and 
"police" (how many "a", "b", "c", etc in a font) I have seen in 
typography manuals. Around the beginning of the 20th century, one start 
to see books without accented capitals (and unfortunately books with 
inconsistent use of the accented capitals).


Eric.

Re: Aw: Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
On 12/9/2015 11:57 PM, "Jörg Knappen"
  wrote:


  

  Since the captial sharp s is easily available to the
public, I see it popping up everywhere in
  German publications, mostly in an all caps environment. I
have a small collection of it (on paper).
   
  The use of the capital sharp s in German is not only a
historical artefact, it is recent and modern.

  


Thanks for the info. Any way you could scan / photograph them and
share them via a picture sharing site?

Also, here's a nice writeup in English:
http://typography.guru/journal/germanys-new-character/

A./

  

   
  --Jörg Knappen
   
  Martin Dürst wrote:
  

  However, the example is also
somewhat misleading. The book in the
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited
is new. I checked
with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I
found had the
officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I
remember that when the
upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode,
source material
showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time ago
(possibly close
in age with the old Duden picture). So we would have to
go back and
check the book in the picture to see what it says about
ß to be able to
claim that Duden was (at some point in time)
inconsistent with itself.

Regards, Martin.