Comment 76 for bug 650498

My apologies, Bruno, for perhaps overstating what I perceived to be your affinity to certain ẞ designs. As often in life, this too may be a case where we have to settle for acceptable instead of likable.

You are correct, of course, in stating that type designers have the opportunity (and perhaps the duty) to improve the design of letters. I would submit, however, that your opportunities are limited in regard to Ubuntu, for a couple of reasons:

1. It is at least four years too late to change the basic shape of the letter. After Unicode codified the U+1E9E code point, virtually every German media outlet and every local paper ran a story about it – usually with a picture of an ẞ. All of these showed the basic letter form that has been in continuous use for over 100 years. There had been a vigorous debate in Germany: should the upcoming adoption of the code point be used to change (perhaps, “improve”) the basic shape of the letter, possibly to an S with a diacritic? The prevailing consensus which emerged was not to change the shape that had organically developed over 130 or so years. After codification and the resulting widespread media coverage, the public appeared to agree, which was not surprising. In other words: the ẞ was not created some four years ago; it just became a whole lot easier to use it on a computer. It is conceivable that the community or the public would have decided differently, perhaps to change the uppercase form of ß to S with slash, S with z above or below, or something else altogether. That just didn’t happen.

2. From what I understand, Canonical has commissioned Dalton Maag to create a family of typefaces and the corresponding computer fonts to be used in the default Ubuntu UI. I assume that Canonical’s expectation would be that the typefaces represent the letters of the world (starting with Europe) as they currently ARE – as users expect them, as readers of text set in Ubuntu will recognize them. If Bruno or anyone else wants a soapbox from which to advocate a fundamental change of letter forms, he or she is welcome to build one and climb onto it. Please do it on your own dime, though.

This does not mean that Dalton Maag doesn’t have considerable leeway in designing the specific representations of ẞ in Ubuntu. In fact, the leeway is probably greater than for most letters. You can pick almost anything that is immediately recognizable as an ẞ by Germans and Austrians who have been using this letter for 100+ years. For this, you need to honor the BASIC letter form, i.e., a shape that resembles something like ſ, |, Γ or ∫ on the left; and something like ʒ, S or 3 on the right. Huge leeway, I would say! Only completely different forms (such as ‘S with diacritic’) are unacceptable. (The latter might make for an interesting stylistic alternative in a display typeface. It would be inappropriate as the default form in a UI font.)