questions & comments

[Rebecca and Rowland]

At 3:39 am -0400 8/7/98, Hilmar Schlegel wrote:
>Thierry Bouche wrote:
>>
>> »  No one needs an "uppercase" sharp s.
>>
>> you mean you never say \section{Gau\ss} and expect to get GAUSS in
>> headings?
>
>Do you see an "upper case" sz in GAUSS? I see only in the extreme case
>an upper case long-s and final-s there.... ;-)
>
>Seriously, no you don't need a "SS" character for doing the example
>exactly as your intention is - that was actually the message ;-) Aside
>>from this it is really funny to find that authors who set Gau\ss
>correctly are hard to find - usually they write Gauss anyway.

It depends on what you mean by `correct'.  As far as I can tell the correct
way to write the SI unit `gauss' is like that.  And you could argue that
the correct way to write the name `Gauss' if you're writing English is like
that too, since English doesn't have \ss.

>BTW, his signature was written "Gau long-s final-s" - of course not
>*every* font provides these...

As I understood it, the `sz' (\ss) character is basically a long-s final-s
ligature.  It even looks like that to me.  Can anyone explain what the
difference between \ss and long-s final-s is supposed to be?

(and anyway, don't trust signatures: Shakespeare spelt his name several
different ways when he signed his name, but the `correct' spelling is now
generally considered to be Shakespeare, so he must have got it wrong most
of the time ;-)

Rowland.