Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 101762
Incorrect Capitalisation of German Sharp S (add U+1E9E as ß for Find and Replace/and Upper to Lowercase)
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:34:12 UTC
The Unicode Standard 5.1 now supports Capital German Sharp S at codepoint 1E9E (hex) 7838 (decimal). The current version 3.1 final capitalises ß (00DF hex) to "SS" and, of course, lowercase then converts back to "ss", which is plainly wrong. UnicodeData.txt for version 5.1 contains this pair of glyph definitions: 00DF;LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;German;;; 1E9E;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;00DF; Also new in Unicode 5.1 are these three pairs of glyphs in Latin Extended Additional, which may as well be fixed by whoever undertakes to fix the current issue: 1EFA;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER MIDDLE-WELSH LL;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;1EFB; 1EFB;LATIN SMALL LETTER MIDDLE-WELSH LL;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;1EFA;;1EFA 1EFC;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER MIDDLE-WELSH V;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;1EFD; 1EFD;LATIN SMALL LETTER MIDDLE-WELSH V;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;1EFC;;1EFC 1EFE;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH LOOP;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;1EFF; 1EFF;LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH LOOP;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;1EFE;;1EFE
Created attachment 62163 [details] Sample of Uppercase and Lowercase Text
"plainly wrong", that's a good joke. Duden (or more precise: the official rules for german orthography §25 - see rules here: http://www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/ , where the "Duden" is the most representative dictionaries) represents the uppercase version of ß as SS, and that's to be considered more than unicode standard. Of course OOo cannot know as to SS was a ß when converting from upper to lowercase. Use Format|Character→Font-Effects→Capitals instead. That way only the visual representation is changed, but the character-info remains intact. Furthermore: Virtially no font contains the capital ß character glyph ẞ there's no point in changing characters to one that cannot be displayed on the user's computer. For completeness, U+1E9E should be considered in find and replace and when turning from upper- to lowercase, thus flagging as RFE and since it is rather easily done, add easy2dev keyword
There is no need to make insulting remarks. Converting German uppercase SS to lowercase ss is plainly wrong, it should be converted back to lowercase German ß from whence it came. The method that OpenOffice uses when a font lacks the right glyphs is glyph fallback. So perhaps it can encode capitalised ß as 1E9E but use "SS" from the current font as a glyph fallback if 1E9E doesn't exist in the current font. On converting 1E9E to lowercase, it would rightly switch to ß.