Thursday, April 21, 2011

iOS Has No Capital Sharp S (ẞ)

A poster in the Apple Support Communities recently pointed out that iOS devices cannot display the character Latin Capital Letter Sharp S (U+1E9E), which was added to Unicode in 2008 and can potentially be found in German language text. Oddly even the full OS X only has one font that includes this character, Geneva Regular. For some background, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ß

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Never used the capital ß ever. Usually we go fo an SS which is the perfect choice given that STRAßENBAHN (with a proper capital ß of course) looks a bit funny and out of place. And since we got a set of new spelling rules most street plates that have Straße (new) in it are still written STRASSE (old). So, no big deal.

Tom Gewecke said...

You are right, I think. But as a matter of principle such characters for major languages should be easily available.