Hi Michael,

Same rights for characters, same rights for same-gender relationships… Things are moving forward in Germany ;)

It was about time to see the upper-case Eszett (ẞ) emerge as official alternative [1]. A few German type setters have been using the character for some years (it was added to Unicode in 2008), but it will take some time until we will have good-looking upper-case Eszetts in standard fonts (even the lower-case Eszett often looks like a stranger in many professional font sets, because it is exclusively used in German language).

Regarding the assymetric case conversion (the lower-case conversion of 'ẞ' yields 'ß', while we currently get 'SS' when converting 'ß' to upper-case), I guess that this will remain the standard, as SS is still a legal alternative (at least at the moment). – Andy’s response, which I’ve just seen, seems to confirm this assumption.

All the best,
Christian

[1] Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben schreibt man SS. Daneben ist auch die Verwendung des Großbuchstabens ẞ möglich. Beispiel: Straße – STRASSE – STRAẞE. (http://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2017.pdf, §25 E3)



On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 12:24 AM, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com> wrote:
> From Die Zeit, I learn that new orthographic rules issued by the
> Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung specify that ß / esszett / sharp s
> shall now have an uppercase form.
>
> From the comments there, I learn further that codepoint
> U+1E9E has already been assigned to this character.
>
> Will the default collation used for upper-case be changed
> to map U+00DF to U+1E9E?
>
> I notice that lower-case already maps U+1E9E to U+00DF,
> in the version 7.9 on my disk. (Am I already that far out of
> date? Sigh.)
>
> best regards,
>
> Michael Sperberg-McQueen
>
> --
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> * C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
> * http://www.blackmesatech.com
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