Capital ß

:"For a more detailed treatment of this topic, see the German-language Wikipedia article Großes ß"

"ß" is nearly unique among the letters of the Latin alphabet in that it has no traditional upper case form (one of the few other examples is kra, which was used in Greenlandic). This is because it never occurs initially, and traditional German printing (which used blackletter) never used all-caps.

There have been repeated attempts to introduce an upper case ß. Such letterforms can be found in some older German books dating back to the late 19th century and some modern signage and product design. One of the best known examples is the East German 1957 Duden.

Proposed inclusion in Universal Character Set

A recent proposal by Andreas Stötzner to the Unicode Consortium for the inclusion of "capital double s" [ [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2888.pdf Proposal to encode Latin Capital Letter Double S (rejected)] ] in the Universal Character Set was rejected in 2004, on the basis that capital ß is a typographical issue, and therefore not suitable for character encoding. Stötzner's proposal was resubmitted on 2007-04-25 [ [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3227.pdf Proposal to encode Latin Capital Letter Sharp S to the UCS] ] . The proposal suggested the Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S. The proposal has been adopted and the character was added as Unicode character "unicode|ẞ" "unicode|ſƷ" U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf] when Unicode 5.1 was released, on 4 April 2008.

Glyph designs

A number of designs have been proposed for the "Versal-Eszett", all based on the origins of the lowercase ß as a ligature of a long s and a round z, but applying those principles to the design of uppercase rather than lowercase letters.

The most common is the design used on the cover of "Signa" magazine, which joins an ascender made from an inverted capital U to an ezh-like partial capital letter Z. Another similar design uses the ascender of a capital letter 'F' instead of the inverted U ascender. A radically different design that still reflects the same typographic history consists of two capital letters S joined by a short stroke at the top to form a ligature.

Typographers have yet (April 2008) to agree on a standard form for the letter capital ß, as they did in 1903 when an association of German printers and type foundries agreed on the "Sulzbacher Form" as standard for the lowercase ß.

See also

* ß

References

Further reading

* "Das große Eszett." In: "Signa", Heft Nr. 9. Edition Waechterpappel, Grimma 2006, ISBN 3-933629-17-9. (in German)

External links

* [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2888.pdf Andreas Stötzner: "Capital Double S". Proposal to the Unicode Consortium (pdf)] (in English)
* [http://www.typeforum.de/news_158.htm Article in the typeFORUM of DDR-Duden-Ausgabe in 1965] (in German)
* [http://www.typografie.info/typowiki/index.php?title=Versal-Eszett The „Versal-Eszett“ in the Typowiki] (in German)
* [http://www.typeforum.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=XForum&file=viewthread&tid=353 Discussion of letterforms for capital ß in typeFORUM] (in German)