Comment 31 for bug 650498

In many instances new letters were made up to represent a specific sound in a particular language that wasn't covered by the existing alphabet. The most obvious example are diacritics - which I would argue the R with tail is. Many of these characters came to life, particularly in Africa, during the 19th Century when missionaries roamed the continent and transliterated the native language into written form using the Latin alphabet. And they found themselves lacking in letters.

Not being designers they simply took what was there already and adapted it with fairly little regard to typographic history and sensitivity. The Eszett is such a case, too. No one could be bothered, back in the metal type days, to actually design a proper cap version - instead they simply used the lowercase form since it was there already. Unfortunately, when the glyph finally had an official status the lowercase form was already so impregnated in people's minds that it had become the defacto design without any regard to the structures of capital shapes v lowercases.

Regardless of my opinion of this character, I would suggest that we actually do have an opportunity here to design a 'real' form that matches the architecture of cap characters, not simply ape a shape that has sneaked its way in.