Small-cap Eszett impossible to input in InDesign?

[Ralf H.]

I guess there will always be disagreement between German speakers about the use of that glyph

I predict it will be a transition over one or two generations. Same thing happened for the Umlauts. They started out as a lowercase ligature and when their use was common, the uppercase versions slowly appeared and are now standard too. We are used to them now, so no one is questioning the existence of those characters, even though—ironically—their formal development from a lowercase letter is something that some experts now use as an argument against the cap Eszett.

the strongest argument I have heard in favour of the new Unicode character, from a German, is that it enables reliable one-to-one round-trip case mapping

Well, of course. This is how every Western alphabet works. See also http://opentype.info/blog/2011/01/24/capital-sharp-s/
And that's why I always get a little mad, when typographers(!) call the cap Eszett a “silly” idea. It is silly not to have a lowercase AND uppercase version of any character in any Western alphabet. Its the most basic principle.

My impression of Duden is that it tends to favour a top-down approach to spelling, reflecting official decision making rather than popular usage.

They do both. Of course they follow the spelling reform, because this is now the new standard. But when new words or new spellings become widely used, they list these also, even though they are not in the official German orthography.

[twardoch]

I agree with Ralf. There is also a strong linguistic reason for having an “uppercase ß” (U+1E9E, ẞ) adopted widely:

In the pre-1996 German spelling, the basic principle for writing consonants after a vowel was:
— if the vowel is long, write a single consonant (in “Bote”, the “o” is long)
— if the vowel is short, write a doubled consonant (in “Gott”, the “o” is short)

This was a very reliable rule, that also applied to “s” and “ss”, e.g. in “Mus”, the “u” was long, and in “Masse”, the “a” was short. The only exception was “ß” where the behavior was “undefined”. If “ß” followed a vowel, you never knew whether the preceding vowel was long (as in “groß”) or short (as in “muß” or “daß”). The reader needed to “memorize” the pronunciation. So “ß” was viewed as an ambiguous letter that was either “single” or “doubled” depending on the context. This was correct historically, because “ß” was originally a doubled letter, and then a ligature.

But in the 1996 spelling reform a rule was introduced, which has been kept up in the 2006 “reform of the reform” that “ß” is a single letter. So all situations where the preceding vowel was long kept the “ß” (“groß” is the new spelling) while in all the situations where the vowel was short, the “ß” was replaced by “ss” (“muss”, “dass” is the new spelling).

So now, German is written very logically, and the single-or-doubled consonant rule is reliable. But this has repercussions.

All the readers who grow up with the new spelling, or adopted it quickly (such as myself) rely on the rule blindly. In the words “Rußpartikel” or “Großenkel”, it is absolutely obvious that the vowels preceding “ß” are long. It’s automatic, there is no doubt about it.

So, “ß” is a single letter.

But hang on... Not when the word is written in uppercase! When I convert the word to uppercase using the currently valid rules, I get “RUSSPARTIKEL” or “GROSSENKEL”, and then the acquired reading automatism forces me to think that the “U” vowel in the first word or the “O” vowel in the second word is short. So I mispronounce the words.

This of course is most problematic for personal names, where you don’t really know a “memorized” pronunciation. “Frank Mussmann”: “u” is short, of course. “Frank Mußmann”: “u” is long, of course. But “FRANK MUSSMANN”? “Well of course, the U is short”, says my reading automatism. But I may be wrong!

If “ß” is a single letter now, why is its uppercase representation a doubled letter? That’s now (after the 1996-2006 reforms) less logical than it was before. It’s now completely counter-intuitive.

So I strongly presume that the reason why the case conversion rules were not changed in 1996 or 2006 was purely technical. I.e., there was no technical means to represent a “more logical conversion”, because the uppercase “ß” character was not codified or even “invented”.

Andreas Stötzner’s Unicode proposal has resolved this barrier. The Windows 7 versions of the Microsoft core fonts (Arial, Times New Roman etc.) have been revised to include the U+1E9E character (ẞ), and more and more fonts are coming out that include it. A search at MyFonts reveals 106 families that include the uppercase ß character. Not many, but I’m sure more are coming.

So we’re in a technical transitional period now. Just like with the Euro currency character, the technical support needs to be there first (fonts and keyboard layouts), but at some point people will be adopting ẞ more and more widely — because it’s the only logical thing to do.

Arguments against it are based purely on tradition and history. Arguments for it are based on linguistics, pragmaticism, logic and practicality. Go figure who will “win” in the longer term :)

[twardoch]

UPDATE: In 2010, the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (“Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie”) published the 5th revised edition of the document “Toponymic guidelines for map and other editors for international use Federal Republic of Germany”.

Section 1.1.3 of this document says:

1.1.3 Special letter ẞ ß
The special letter ß (“strong s”) existed hitherto only as small letter (minuscule). In 2007 DIN and ISO accepted the capital letter ẞ which is rendered on position 1E9E of the Unicode character tables. In official spelling it must not be substituted by any other letter combination, as e.g. SS, ss. In the alphabetical order ẞ, ß is treated like SS, ss. Since a typographical implementation of the upper case letter ẞ in the various character fonts will take some time, it may be temporarily substituted by SS, ss.
NEW: Due to the new regulation of German spelling the letter ß is after a short (stressed) vowel now replaced by ss. The letter ß remains after a long vowel or a diphthong.

Examples for names of geographical regions:
— now: Hassberge (short and stressed vowel a), until now: Haßberge
— will continue: Meißner (diphthong preceding ß), MEIẞNER
— will continue: Großer Feldberg (long vowel o preceding ß), GROẞER FELDBERG

Example for an officially approved name of a municipality
— will continue: Haßfurt, HAẞFURT (though a short and stressed vowel a is preceding ß)

This is, to my knowledge, the first official German government body that not only approves but actually prescribes the use of uppercase ß (U+1E9E, ẞ), and only accepts the use of SS “temporarily” (“since a typographical implementation of the upper case letter ẞ in the various character fonts will take some time”).

Regards,
Adam

[Nick Shinn]

Unfortunately, we pioneers of the inevitable are creating fonts with OpenType encoding that will become obsolete once the change is made official.

Presently, our coding in 'smcp' and 'c2sc' maps ß to a glyph that looks like two small cap s's.

Perhaps in future smart layout applications could, when 'germandbls.smcp' is called for, search for 'uni1E9E.smcp', and, if it exists in a font, use it instead.

Or is that what the "world-ready paragraph composer" is already doing?

Adam, what is the OpenType coding in that Trump sample that you showed above?

[twardoch]

Nick,

as I've pointed out in my post, it's:

feature smcp {
...
sub germandbls by germandbls.smcp;
...
} smcp;

A.

[Nick Shinn]

Sorry, not paying attention.

Your explanation of what happens is more complex than the single character substitution I suggested.
What would happen if you changed the name of your small cap eszett to something quite different than uni1E9E.smcp?