Accordingly the decision as to which form to use is not someting to be left up to intelligent fonts, any more than capitalization should be, though capital letters and small letters (and small capitals) are also presentation variants of each other.
The long s and short s variant situtation is not unique in Unicode. In Greek there are the variant forms U+03C3 GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA and U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA which are parallel to the Latin letter forms in usage. Unicode also enclodes the variant U+03F2 GREKK LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL.
In Hebrew final variants of certain letters are also coded separately from the normal forms. In the Unicode Standard 8.1 it is noted for Hebrew:
Certain words, however, are spelled with nominal rather than final forms, particularly names and foreign borrowings in Hebrew, and some words in Yiddish. Because final form usage is a matter of spelling convention, softwware should not automatically substitute final forms for nominal forms at the end of words. The positional variants should be code directly from the codeset and rendered one-to-one via their own glyphs--that is, without contextual analysis.The Unicode rule seems to be that for characters where variants normally vary by position, but not always, to encode both. This allows an author or copier of text to freely chose between them by entering the character desired which is easier and more robust than depending on differing high level public and private protocols and numerous and differing and conflicting programs which might be embedded in different fonts.
In English black letter characters may be used in formal circumstances, for example on a presentation scroll, usually with words spelled using modern convetions, including universal use of short s. The same font may be used for transcribing genuine medieval text using both long s and short s.
One sometimes also wishes to use long s in any Latin letter font for quoting from older text where long s was used. This might have been done more often in the past if the long s character had been more readily available.
It would be more confusing if some fonts reversed the glyphs or represented both as the same glyph and others did not. Orthographic distinctions should not nomrally be be resprented by a font change.
Similarly u and v in Elizabethan English writing are often mainly used in the reverse of modern convention, with the vowel usually indicated by v and the consonant by u. I don't think a modern digitized font based on an Elizabethan English font should therefore swap the positions of the characters.
Jim Allan
