About Sharp S (ß)

Many of you may already know about lowercase Sharp S (ß) which is used in German spelling as a replacement for "ss". For instance, the German word gross 'large' could also be spelled as groß and Strasse 'street' can be spelled as Straße. The form itself is an old manuscript convention that was incorporated into modern typograhpy.

So far so good, but what it means from a computing perspective is that any program working with German text has to know that gross and groß are essentially the same word, just with sligthly different spellings. If you're looking in a library database for instance, you would want to see both sets of results. On an interesting side note, I entered in groß and pulled up the English Wikipedia page on the "gross" unit of measure as the first result - correct, but weird..

But not capital ß

In official German spelling convention, there is NO CAPITAL SHARP S. First, no German word starts with "SS", so no word could ever begin with ß anyway. But even if a word is in all-caps or small caps, the convention should be to convert all ß to SS - thus groß should be GROSS in all caps.

Makes sense...except that people in German DO use capital Sharp S in some signs, gravestones and business names (similar to "Nite-Quil" instead of "Night-Quill"). The 2004 Proposal on Encoding Capital S Sharp (PDF) contains a variety of photographs of Capital S Sharp in use. You can see one of these on Wikipedia (Capital ß page). In other words, Unicode ultimately has to bow to social usage.

So finally we have the official Unicode announcement...

Official Unicode 5.1 Announcement

In particular, capital sharp s is intended for typographical representations of signage and uppercase titles, and other environments where users require the sharp s to be preserved in uppercase. Overall, such usage is rare. In contrast, standard German orthography uses the string "SS" as uppercase mapping for small sharp s. Thus, with the default Unicode casing operations, capital sharp s will lowercase to small sharp s, but not the reverse: small sharp s uppercases to "SS". In those instances where the reverse casing operation is needed, a tailored operation would be required.

http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/

There's a very nice write up of the issue at http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2888.pdf (PDF)

Now What?

First the fonts will have to be developed to include a capital ß variant. This may or be in your system yet. Here's a quick test. It wasn't looking good, even though I am on on Leopard Mac.

Next comes the "casing" question. Casing is the set of eqiuvalences which match capital and lowercase letters as "the same" even though they are really two Unicode code points. For instance capital A is U+0041 (ASCII 65) encoded as while lowercase A is U+0061 (ASCII 97). When you search Google and most databases, both A and a are treated the same (yet are kept distinct enough so that you can switch between A and a in your word processor). Note that English casing also conflates Á,Å,À,Ä as just A.

As stated before, official German spelling does not recognize capital ß, but not surprisingly, there was a discussion in the Unicode list just this week on whether this too will change over time. I'll be staying tuned.

A Linguistic Closing Thought

Normally linguists talk about seeing a sound change or a grammar change in progress, but this appears to be a spelling change in progress. Wikipedia Capital ß page claims that legal documents often use capital sharp S in all cap names in order to avoid ambiguiity (e.g the defendant Hans Straßer or HANS STRAßER). And apparently the most notorious use of capital ß is the title page of Der Große Duden (The Great Duden dictionary) which was rendered as DER GROßE DUDEN. Clearly the capital sharp S was destined for permanent encoding.

See http://www.aatseel.org/medieval_slavic_font for more information

List includes Unicode fonts and older non-Unicode fonts

Finding It

When you are discussing a topic with lots of different symbols, you soon realize that in terms of Unicode, they will come from multiple blocks. For instance double struck P is from the Letter Like Symbols block (starts at U+2100), while other math symbols may be in Arrows block, the Number Forms block, the Mathematical Operators Block or possibly the Dingbats Block. You can see from the Unicode Org Symbols and Punctuation Chart just how many blocks are involved.

Although a user doesn't normally have to know the Unicode point value, because many insertion tools such as the Windows Character Map, Mac Character Pallete or others are organized primarily by block, you do have to sort of have an idea of how blocks work.

Rarity

Fonts with a robust set of math symbols are still pretty rare, and sometimes the letter like symbols are even rarer. At one point I had ℙ (P) pulling from one font and ℚ (Q) from another...interesting. Below are some fonts I know have doublestruck letters like ℙ,ℚ.

• Windows/Mac Leopard - Arial Unicode MS
• Macintosh OS X - Apple Symbol, Hiragino Mincho Pro W3 (Japanese), Hiragino Mincho Pro W6 (Japanese ), Lucida Sans
• Unicode Symbols
• Hindsight Unicode
• Chrysanthi (Chryʃsanþi)

Formatting Issues

Normally I try to avoid font and size specifications, but double struck P is an interesting counterexample. One challenge is that because the legs are hollowed out, it has a much lighter visual appearance than say normal P. My base text is 12 px on the Web, but for the double struck P, I decided to bump up the size to about 16 px (in a standards-compliant way of 1.3 em).

The other issue was selecting font faces. I wanted one with thick double legs - if you look at the font chart below from my Mac, you'll see that some fonts had some very skinny legs.

I also prefer the serif fonts in this case since I personally believe serifs help inexperieced users in reading unfamiliar scripts (in this case undergraduate college students). For this course, I'll probably point students to some freeware fonts I like

Double struck letters in particular are used in different branches of mathematics to respresent, for instance, the set of all real numbers (double struck R) or in symbolic logic to symbolize any atomic proposition. See the table below for different double struck letters and their Unicode values. See the Penn State Math Symbol chart for other common letter like symbols of math.

Character Name	Character	Entity	Num Entity	Hex Entity
DOUBLE-STRUCK REAL NUMBER (Double R)	ℝ	--	ℝ	ℝ
COMPLEX NUMBERS (Double C)	ℂ	--	ℂ	ℂ
NATURAL NUMBERS (Double N)	ℕ	--	ℕ	ℕ
PRIME NUMBERS (Double P)	ℙ	--	ℙ	ℙ
RATIONAL NUMBERS (Double Q)	ℚ	--	ℚ	ℚ
INTEGERS (Double Z)	ℤ	--	ℤ	ℤ

]]> http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/2008/05/glyph-du-jour-doublestruck-p.html http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/2008/05/glyph-du-jour-doublestruck-p.html Accents & Punctuation Fri, 09 May 2008 17:47:16 -0500 I was able to upgrade to Leopard recently on my Mac which means I'm able to manipulate a working version of Arial Unicode MS for the Mac...yeah.

Web Display

My blog actually switched to Arial Unicode because of the way I had coded the CSS. It was very legible, but the x-height seemed smaller in comparison to the Apple Lucida Grande - so I reordered the priority. I will have to see if I can download Lucida Grande onto Windows via the Windows Safari download.

Back to the Logic Symbols in Word

Most of my recent Unicode adventures have been about inserting logic symbols like (∨,∧,⊃) into Word (and later Excel). My main struggle has been that if I insert them from the Character Palette, the font switches to Symbol... which is OK until I start typing English. At that point I will stop outputting the English alphabet and σταρτ ουτπυτιν τηε γρεεκ αλπηαβετ. Greek is great...unless you're typing English text. I was using the left arrow key quite a bit.

Now that Microsoft has developed a working version of Arial Unicode MS, I can input the symbols without switching over to Greek. The only gotcha is that I have to shif old logic symbols out of their pre Arial Unicode fonts (thank goodness for keyboard shortcuts). What I'm hoping is that I can bypass the big font switch in Windows word too.

So I'm happy to say that we're adding another small step towards Unicode compatibility. Finally I can have logic symbols in a non-Greek, non-Japanese, non-Chinese font!

The SIL group is using a new term I think should become more common - the macrolanguage. A macrolanguage is basically a set of related languages that share a common "identity" even though speakers can't normally understand each other.

Macrolanguages happen when language spreads to different regions and changes, but the cultural or political unity remains. Other macrolanguages include Arabic, Cree, Hmong, Quechua (as spoken in the Incan Empire), and Norweigian. I suspect that you could thrown in some other candidates like German and Italian - (we'd have more if the Roman Empire had made it to the 21st century.)

In any case, The ISO-639-3 language tag standard has a set of macrolanguage mappings which show how different related languages can map to each other so that either Mandarin Chinese (cmn) or Cantonese (yue) can also be called Chinese (zh or zho)

I really hope this term takes hold...because I really think it will simplify other discussions about language tags. After all, it was just this year that a language technology guru claimed that English had no "true dialects." I think he meant to say that English hasn't reached macrolanguage status yet.

If you're interested in the new characters, the best place to view them is at http://www.unicode.org/charts/

New Plane 0 Scripts

• Cham (Cambodia/Vietnam)
• Kayah Li (Thailand/Myanmar)
• Lepcha (India)
• Ol Chiki/Santali (India)
• Rejang (indonesia)
• Saurashtra (India)
• Sundanese (Indonesia)
• Vai (Liberia)

Script Extensions

These blocks add characters to previously encoded scripts.

• Cyrillic Extended-A
• Cyrillic Extended-B
• Arabic - characters for math, 4 Qu'ranic and multiple characters for different languages
• Indic - Malayalam, Tamil character sequences, Devanagari chandra a,
  Sanskrit sounds in Gurmukhi, Oriya, Telegu
• Latin - characters for minority languages and capital German sharp S (rare)
• Math Symbols
• Medievalist Punctuation - for research
• Myanmar Additions

New Plane 1 Ancient Scripts and Miscellaneous Symbols

• Carian (Anatolia/Turkey)
• Lycian (Anatolia/Turkey)
• Lydian (Anatolia/Turkey)
• Phaistos Disk (Crete)
• Domino Tile Symbols
• Mahjong Tile Symbols

As I said last entry, I'm working on a symbolic logic course and am learning new quirks for dealing with with Unicode logic symbols...and one of them apparently is the Microsoft Word Insert Symbol tool (this is found by going to Insert » Symbol in most versions of Word.

Like the Windows Character Map and Mac Character Palette, the Insert Symbol tool lets you insert single characters into a document so you can change "P implies Q" to the logical formulation P ⊃ Q or P → Q depending on your symbolism (and you can also switch between "P and Q," P & Q or P ∧ Q).

But...unlike the Windows Character Map/Mac Character Palette, the Insert Symbol tool can take you on a little detour out of standard Unicode and into the Microsoft Private Use Area block - or the block where vendors can define their own characters. For instance, when I tried to insert the character ∩ (union) into a document, I noticed that the Insert Symbol palette gave a code point of U+F0C7 instead of the expected U+2229, and yes the U+F0 code is a sign that you are in the Private Use Area.

First I should say that there is a rationale for this. You'll notice that the font in the graphic is set to "Symbol" which is an older pre-Unicode font which was used to insert lots of special mathematical symbols. The Private Use set-up undoubtedly prevents a lot older documents from breaking.

So What?

If all you're doing is using with Word, the Insert Symbol tool may still be working for you. But these days, more and more documents are actually destined for the Web or some other format...and not all tools recognize the Microsoft Private Use codes.

The way I first noticed that the logic symbols weren't standard Unicode was that some logic symbols did not "convert" well to HTML in Course Genie but mysteriously became things like "(". The ones I had inserted properly converted, but not the ones inserted with the Word Symbol tool. Ugh.

The use of proper Unicode versus an older format does have a real world impact.

Summary

To avoid the Private Use function in new Word documents just always use the WWindows Character Map and Mac Character Palette. On Windows, you may need to switch the font to Arial Unicode.

Or if you're especially insane, you can develop your own logic symbol keyboard utility.

This is a tool which takes a Word file "injected" with the right styles and converts a long Word manuscript into a set of well-formed HTML documents complete with table of contents page and page navigation. Even if you don't insert any self-test quizzes, this is a major time saver. But...can it do Unicode?

For once, this is a real issue since the course I'm working on is symbolic logic and uses plenty of specialized symbols like ∪,∩,∃x,∀x and so forth. So far I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that the CourseGenie planners did think ahead and implemented decent Unicode strategies.

The good news is that if your instructor (aka subject matter expert) hands you a Word file including these symbols, you may not have to do much other than make sure that the symbols are inserted from the Character Map and not from an old custom font. Course Genie by default will either convert these to numeric codes...or if you select a special UTF 8 theme, even include the UTF-8 meta tag.

For most modern browsers this is sufficient. The only gotcha is that it sets everything to Verdana text (even the symbols) and IE 5/6 acts a little strange when fonts for special characters are pre-specified for Arial Unicode.

The other complaint is that that most theme settings insert the ISO-8859-1 Latin-1 encoding meta tag instead of UTF-8...EVEN THOUGH the base XML file is UTF-8. Unless you know to select a UTF-8 theme, you won't get meta tag. Not only does this make me nervous on principle, but it means that you have to be extra careful if you ever edit the files in another program like Dreamweaver.

For Web 1.0, the safest way to display accented letters was with numeric entity codes. For instance, if wanted to display Ụwa, I might write Ụwa within the HTML document. The codes were safer because they would work even if a developer forgot to include the UTF-8 meta tag.

In a Web based form, the rules may differ depending on how the developer configured the service. In some forms, you MUST enter the numeric code (often because the UTF-8 tag is missing). In other cases you CANNOT use the numeric code - this is true when you are entering data into a text field which will not go through any HTML formatting schemes. As long as the output has the UTF-8 meta tag (and Facebook does), you can avoid a numeric code (i.e. enter a "raw" accented letter) and still be OK.

How can you tell? Unfortunately, you have to test each application one by one. As I've commented before, applications which truly expect to support a global audience are generally UTF-8 ready and you can skip the numeric code. This includes Facebook, MovableType, iTunes, GoogleMaps, Twitter and so forth.

Being able to skip the numeric code is a positive sign (why memorize numbers when you can type?), but as with all change, there will be some old habits to break.

Like the release of Microsoft's release Arial Unicode MS for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) I think this is really good for the  Web community. A lot of Mac-oriented designers have gotten hooked on Lucida Grande, but they don't always realize that it's not available on Windows (or they think that Arial is a good substitute, when Arial Unicode may be more appropriate.

With both Arial Unicode and Lucida Grande available for both platforms, the headaches of developing cross-OS friendly sites should be reduced in the future. We may be able to (gasp) pick a Unicode font we like and assume it will be on almost all machines. Wow!!!

FYI - If your site needs to display a lot of quirky characters (like this one does), I would still recommend your CSS file allow for both Arial Unicode MS and Lucida Grande...at least for the next few years.

• Cymrux Welsh Linux - The penguin has a red dragon pal...and both are the same size!
  
• Linux4Arab - Stylish eye wear and head gear for our Antarctic avian.
  
• Linux Malta^† (dead link) - The penguin in the world's cutest crusader outfit (you had to be there).
• Russian Linux^† (dead link) - imagine if you can, a brown furry penguin with teddy bear ears. This one was a Photoshop composite.

P.S. If you're wondering where the heck this post came from - I'm testing the blog tool again.

As a result, some of the base-line tools that Apple and Microsoft provide may not necessarily get installed. For instance, I recommend the Windows Character Map as a last resort for a lot of Windows users. But in the past few months, I've gotten questions (mostly outside Penn State) saying the user can't find it and where the heck is it.

The truth is...it may not have gotten installed. I've noticed that in order to save space, some "exotic" utilities may be skipped. Hmmmm!

Truthfully, I can understand skipping the East Asian utilities because they do take up a lot of disk space (one East Asian font can be about 8-20 MB vs. 200-500 K for Western-only fonts)...but I do worry that even the basic tools for handling the € sign are also not included.

It's difficult enough for the busy administrative assistant, instructor or Spanish I student (in the lab) to figure out how to insert the exotic symbols. Imaging trying to convince an even busier tech support specialist that they need to install some new utilities from the Windows CD-ROM (or the Mac disk) and it's not a very happy scenario.

FYI - The situation at most of Penn State is not like this - I think the Character Map is universally installed. Also, the CLC Student Computing Labs in particular have worked hard to ensure that the best Unicode toolset is available, even East Asian languages. Having said this though, I do hear about the occasional tale of a missing Unicode utility somewhere out there in PSU computer land.

Most scripts in use today were originally designed to be handwritten in ink over a relatively smooth surface such as paper, papyrus, parchment or palm leaves. The benefit of handwriting is that you don't need a lot of expensive equipment (such as a printing press) to produce a document, but the writer must make each letter form one by one.  Writer's cramp can be a serious consideration for workers in the manuscript industry.

To reduce both time and strain to the wrist and hands, most scripts using paper-type media develop cursive forms and special abbreviation symbols (e.g. "&" for 'and' and "@" for 'at'). For instance, Arabic letters vary in shape depending on whether the letter is at the beginning, end or the middle of the word, and it's generally due to the fact that Arabic is essentially a continuous cursive script.

The abbreviation symbols are easily encoded and many are already in the standard, but the alternate letter forms are even trickier. On U.S. computers, if you type the "S" key, the screen usually displays an "S" almost instantaneously. With other scripts like Arabic or Devanagari, the text editor has to know the position of the character within the word before it can display something. In some cases, the text editor has to wait for the NEXT character before it can give you a display. Issues like these are a major why support for Arabic and South Asian scripts continues to lag behind other scripts.

But the story doesn't end there. Beause manuscripts are always handmade, lots of local variations have developed (lots and lots). The preferred Arabic script of Saudi Arabia (Naskh)  is quite a bit different from the preferred script of Urdu (Nastaliq). Even though an  Urdu writer is using the same script is using the same script as  someone in  Saudi Arabia, he or she may not be able to use the same font base. Similar variations can be seen in Chinese vs Japanese writing. Even in Europe, German Fraktur (Blackletter) is quite a bit different from manuscript Gaelic both of which differ quite a bit from modern typography.

And just when you thought you had it all figured out, someone will discover a new manuscript needing a new symbol to encode. Yikes!

Our speaker was documenting some of the more interesting variations you can find in pieces of calligraphy when I hit a conceptual wall. I agree that encoding most of this (probably 90% of this) is historically and culturally important. But...at some point calligraphy is no longer really a document, but an art form. Where do you stop?

After all, the point of many calligraphic traditions isn't really to send a new message, but to find new meaning in old words. Many calligraphic works are actually older texts rewritten to visually represent different nuances in meaning. And many practitioners become celebrated for their abilities to develop a new style of writing.

Graphic programs have protocols for selecting color, shapes, line weight, orientation and so forth, but there is a point where the specifications end and the art begins. Maybe a few of our archival questions can be solved if we remember that some manuscripts are art as well as textual documents.

Some Calligraphy Links

• Chinese Calligraphy
• Arabic Calligraphy
• Hebrew Calligraphy
  

It's certainly not true in any higher education environment where not only do we work with foreign languages, but also mathematical symbols, including the obscure ones. Any time an institution needs to build an archive for an ancient language or math/science, the problem of encoding will rear its ugly little head. Ironically, it may be the classicists, medievalists and comparative literature specialists (fields which are not traditionally not seen as high tech) who have had the most experience with working the Unicode issue.

Is it just some scholars in exotic languages or physics then? Alas not. Many of the carefully crafted punctuation symbols that are appreciated by copy writers and desktop publishers everywhere are ALSO in Unicode. These include the em-dash (—), the en-dash (–), the Euro sign (€) and Smart Quotes “ and ”. There are some kluges in "ISO-8859-1" for some of these symbols...but not all of them. If you want these to work reliably, it's best to select Unicode (UTF-8) and say you're using Unicode!

Even the "foreign" accents work their way into our prose. Once it was just fiancé and José, but now it's even baseball players like Magglio Ordóñez (the "Big Tilde"). If you check out Ordóñez's uniform, you'll see that even his uniform has a tilde on his name. As we gradually learn to embrace some non-Anglo culture and wish to "get it right", the need for spelling with appropriate accents will continue to rise.

In fact, it's amazing that every office I've ever been to, I've had someone ask me how to insert some "exotic" symbol into some document. So yes...even English needs Unicode support to express the full range of textual possibilities.