Two years ago I wrote an article with suggestions on how to design a Capital Sharp S (ẞ). Now that over 400 new type families with support for this new character have been released, I thought it would be a good time to review, how the typedesigners have drawn their Capital Sharp S. At first, […]
Tag Archives: capital sharp s
The Capital Sharp S in Use
A while ago I announced on Twitter, that it is now 5 years since the Capital Sharp S was added to the Unicode. I was asked, if it has actually been used somewhere in real world situations. A valid question! A new character shouldn’t just be made to look good in type specimen brochures. So […]
Typographic Myth Busting: What’s a Ligature, Anyway?
If your work deals with typography in any way, you are very likely familiar with the term ligature. But the definition of this term is often unclear. There seems to be one problem in particular: We usually use the term when we want to talk about a certain kind of ligature, to which cases like […]
Keyboard with Capital Sharp S now in mass production
One of the weaker arguments against a Capital Sharp S (ẞ) has always been, that such a new character cannot become widely accepted, because there is no easy input method for it on a regular German keyboard. But this point has now started to become moot. The keyboard maker Cherry has starter mass production of a […]
Hardly any Support for the Character Capital Sharp S (ẞ) on Mobile Devices
The support for the German Capital Sharp S character (ẞ) on desktop operating systems is already quite good, considering the fact that the Unicode 1E9E was assigned just four years ago and that the need for this character is a pretty local and still controversial subject. On Windows all major system fonts like Arial, Times […]
The Capital Sharp S of the German Government
Next week, it will be exactly four years since the Capital Sharp S was added to the Unicode specification. Within that rather short period of time, it … has been added to over 170 new type families included in the main typefaces of the world’s most used PC operating system Windows and office suite recommended […]
Capital Sharp S explained to Typographers (screencast)
In my talk together with Nadine Roßa at the ATypI conference 2011 in Reykjavík I explained why Germany and Austria need a capital Eszett character today. For those who couldn’t be there, I made a screencast of my talk, which can be seen and commented here. Keep in mind, that this talk was made for […]