If you wanted to get it done with the font...

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/08/30 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/08/30/731033.aspx


It wasn't all that long ago that I was talking about how Sometimes, uppercasing sucks. And between that post and the follow-up one I was showing example strings like

Ρύθμιση σήματος

which a native would expect to be capitalized not as

ΡΎΘΜΙΣΗ ΣΉΜΑΤΟΣ

but instead as

ΡΥΘΜΙΣΗ ΣΗΜΑΤΟΣ

and I pointed out that the NLS casing and collation tables, which pride themselves on features like reversibility and weighed equivalences, simply did not have this type of transformation in mind.

I even suggested that some people were considering the problem from a typographical point of view. Which really makes sense given that it is essentially an appearance issue much more than anything else -- but an important appearance issue, one that should not really be ignored.

And luckily, typographical wizard John Hudson pointed me to this thread over on Typophile that really digs into the issues of dealing with the expected appearance of uppercase Greek from the point of view of the fonts.... definitely worth a look as it really digs into some of the complexities.

So now that it turns out someone has actually been out there doing what I was just kinda hypothesizing about, I thought it would make sense to take a step back and make sure people understand the trade-offs of each method, so I'll talk about some of these issues in a future post....

 

This post brought to you by Σ (U+03a3, a.k.a. GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA)


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referenced by

2006/09/14 Not just uppercasing or italicizing; bolding can cause problems too!

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