
The Curious Case of the Greek Final Sigma - knight666
http://knight666.com/blog/the-curious-case-of-the-greek-final-sigma/
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gcb0
apparently that work is outdated (or incomplete) since 2010..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E)

"Capital sharp s (ẞ) [...] never occurs word-initially in German text, and
traditional German printing (which used blackletter) never used all-caps. When
using all-caps, current spelling rules require the replacement of ß with
SS.[1] However, in 2010 the use of the capital sharp s became mandatory in
official documentation when writing geographical names in all-caps."

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wtbob
If Unicode defines the rule for initial/medial vs. final ſigma, I wonder why
it doeſn't do the ſame for long vs. ſhort s.

More seriously, for encoding purposes shouldn't it be up to the application
using the encoding to choose the right character, not up to the encoding
system to specify the algorithm? But maybe I'm missing something.

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dpkendal
The Unicode case-mapping algorithm is customizable by locale (e.g. uppercase i
is İ in Turkish). A application which needed long s (for German Fraktur, for
instance) could use a custom locale.

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fhars
Specifying the rules for German Fraktur as executable code will be fun, as it
uses the short s at the end of syllables, not words. So it is "Häschen" and
"Häſcher"...

~~~
dpkendal
Unicode has things for this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-
joiner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner)

And customization is done declaratively, not imperatively.

