Comment 34 for bug 650498

Well, trying to calm things abit down ...

Joshua is right when he says, that the ß today is no ligature, is not used as one and doesn't carry any of the specific meaning of a ligature (typographical enhancement, equivalence to decomposed character pair, etc.).

David is right when he says that common glyph design of the ß today originated from the typographical composition (= ligature!) of two glyps (ſ + s/z).

The current discussion about how the capital glyph represented today seems to divide people into two camps:

 - Those who see the problem of people using lower case letters in a all-uppercase setting as the most important one seem to favor the approach of adjusting the lowercase letter to better fit with the other letters, mostly trying to preserve the characteristics of ß to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand from where this character comes from.

 - Those who see the ß as an old-fashioned replacement for ss start from the original design of the two glyph pair two glyps (ſ + s/z) and look for a solution to supply U+1E9E with a good glyph.

I'm interested how both approaches work out and will love to comment on them even if I don't always share the same opinion with everyone here.

History seems to show that the designs of the first camp are generally preferred because they didn't evolve "re-educating readers", but I'm delighted seeing a design of the second approach capturing the essential meaning and semantic of an uppercase ß.

Bye,

Simon