393766 - incorrect letter-spacing on capitalized german letter "ß"

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Daniel.S]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070621 Minefield/3.0a6pre ID:2007062107

The german letter "ß" (the SZ [Eszett, sharp S]) is capitalized to "SS".
Before nsTextFrameThebes was turned on letter-spacing applied to both S. Afterwards, letter-spacing only applied to the second S.

See:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070620 Minefield/3.0a6pre ID:2007062004
WFM ("xßy" becomes "X S S Y"),
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070621 Minefield/3.0a6pre ID:2007062107
Broken ("xßy" becomes "X SS Y").

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Daniel.S]

Attachment: Testcase

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Confirmed on Mac trunk.

Btw, the testcase uses "font-variant: small-caps;", which does more than just capitalize.  "text-transform: uppercase;", which just capitalizes, does show the same bug.

Comment 3

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Fixing this would be nontrivial. I'm going to put it on the back burner.

Comment 4

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Fixing this would be nontrivial. I'm going to put it on the back burner.

Not wanted for 1.9.0.x for the same reason.

Comment 5

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

I need to figure out what the heck to do here.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Actually, this raises another issue, which is whether "font-variant: small-caps;" should actually be uppercasing the es-zet at all. I notice that Safari leaves it as the single ß glyph. On the other hand, there are also instances of fonts that have small-cap glyphs, and include a specific small-cap "SS" glyph for this purpose. (People using such fonts are unlikely to get proper letterspacing either, btw!)

It would be interesting to go back and review some of the discussion from around the time U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S was accepted in Unicode; a starting point could be http://typophile.com/node/33647.

None of this gets us "off the hook" as far as this bug is concerned, though, as capitalizing ß to SS is certainly not going away. Even if we have a font that supports U+1E9E, we'd still need to capitalize as SS by default, as that's the most commonly-accepted practice at least for "text-transform:uppercase".

Comment 7

[Daniel.S]

In the release candidate for Internet Explorer 8, ß is also capitalized to SS. I think that is the best because that really is the most common case in germany.

Comment 8

[[Baboo]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> In the release candidate for Internet Explorer 8, ß is also capitalized to SS.

Can't confirm with the final version of my IE8, the ß stays being an ß.
interestingly enough, IE9 PP8 capitalises it into U+1E9E (ẞ) on my machine (when rendering in IE9 mode).
I am not sure whether this would also be the case on Vista since the capital ß didn't become part of Unicode until after Vista's release and therefore might not be available in any of the default fonts.

Comment 9

[[Baboo]]

Correction: The rendering in IE8 is the same as in IE9 when in standards mode (and not quirks mode in which the test case is rendered because of it having no doctype).

Comment 10

[Daniel.S]

(In reply to comment #6)
> None of this gets us "off the hook" as far as this bug is concerned, though,
> as capitalizing ß to SS is certainly not going away. Even if we have a font
> that supports U+1E9E, we'd still need to capitalize as SS by default, as
> that's the most commonly-accepted practice at least for
> "text-transform:uppercase".

FWIW, IE 9 (on Win 7) uses U+1E9E (capital Eszett) if there is a font having this letter available. Apparently, that's what IE 8 does as well, at least on Win 7 where such fonts exist.
The letter is used for both text-transform: uppercase; as well as font-variant: small-caps;

The letter is rendered even if the font specified doesn't contain it on its own. The ẞ is taken from some other font in that case.

Comment 11

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to comment #10)
> FWIW, IE 9 (on Win 7) uses U+1E9E (capital Eszett) if there is a font having
> this letter available. Apparently, that's what IE 8 does as well, at least
> on Win 7 where such fonts exist.
> The letter is used for both text-transform: uppercase; as well as
> font-variant: small-caps;
> 
> The letter is rendered even if the font specified doesn't contain it on its
> own. The ẞ is taken from some other font in that case.

I'd consider this a bug, and expect users to complain about it.

If the font being used _does_ contain ẞ, then it may be debatable whether ß should be uppercased as ẞ or SS (though I think SS is probably a better default choice). But falling back to a different font - possibly resulting in a visually jarring mismatch of typefaces - is surely a bad idea here.

Comment 12

[Adolfo Jayme]

> If the font being used _does_ contain ẞ, then it may be debatable whether ß should be uppercased as ẞ or SS

Good thing that the German orthography has resolved that question now by standardizing ẞ…

Attachment 278307 [details] is rendered as “X ẞ Y” in Chrome 63.

Comment 13

[Khaled Hosny]

(In reply to Adolfo Jayme from comment #12)
> > If the font being used _does_ contain ẞ, then it may be debatable whether ß should be uppercased as ẞ or SS
> 
> Good thing that the German orthography has resolved that question now by
> standardizing ẞ…
> 
> Attachment 278307 [details] is rendered as “X ẞ Y” in Chrome 63.

Depends on the font you are using; if the font has a small cap ß then you might get ẞ or SS depending on what glyph the font has, if you have a font with no small cap glyph then both Firefox and Chrome still give you SS.