Comment 23 for bug 650498

Bruno et al.,

Ubuntu needs a glyph at U+1E9E, simply for practical reasons. Feel free to skip to my last paragraph for those practical considerations. I'm also adding some context above that.

While it is understandable that speakers of Swiss German (some 5 million people) see little use for the ß, lower-case or otherwise, Austrians (8 million) and Germans (80 million) feel very differently about this. Eszett is simply not used in Switzerland, but it _is_ used in Austria and Germany. Now, in those areas where it has been used (over 90% of German-speaking areas), continuous use of an upper-case ẞ (albeit non-standardized until 2008) has been well documented since the 19th century, essentially right from the point when Germans started to use non-blackletter typefaces. The reasons for this are well known.

While the standard capitalization of ß has been–and will remain to be—SS, the resulting ambiguity is often to be found unacceptable, especially for proper nouns such as names of people and places. Legally and practically, Ms. Großmann and Mr. Grossmann have distinct given names. Therefore, Grossmann's name can not be set in all-caps without a capital ß. As an ugly, UGLY fallback, the name is now rendered in German passports and ID cards with a lower-case ß, i.e., GROßMANN. This affects all people who have an ß in their name—at least hundreds of thousands of people. None of them doubt the need for a capital ß—and the trouble and expense they go through to put customized capital eszetts on their tombstones is just one testament to that.

Place names present another challenge. Gießen, Meißen and Dessau-Roßlau cannot properly be rendered in all-caps without a capital ß. "Gießener Zeitung", a local newspaper first published less than three months (!) after Unicode formally adopted U+1E9E, has been using the capital ß in its nameplate (where GIEẞENER ZEITUNG is rendered in all caps) from the start. Bottom line, Germans do use the capital ß and are not going to stop, whether Bruno likes it or not. ;-)

(Also, Ubuntu rightfully encoded the Indian rupee sign, before it has had a chance to be widely used within India. What's so different about the capital ẞ, which is codified by Unicode and officially sanctioned by the German government?)

But here is the practical consideration: since the glyph is going to be used, people are going to use it on computers, incl. those running Ubuntu. Without a glyph at U+1E9E the Ubuntu typeface, the system WILL pick and display one from the fall-back font. On most systems, that would be DejaVu Sans, whose capital ẞ isn't very pretty to begin with and doesn't match Ubuntu's capitals. Bruno, other Swiss, and even a few traditionalist Germans (without ß in their names or cities) might think that a capital ẞ is unnecessary, stupid, and ugly, but a default interface font that renders a hodgepodge of Ubuntu capitals and the DejaVu Sans ẞ would be doubly ugly. Including a glyph at U+1E9E would change NOTHING for the Swiss and others, on the other hand. The default capitalization of ß would and should continue to be SS, as prescribed by all standards, German and international.