From Die Zeit, I learn that new orthographic rules issued by the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung specify that ß / esszett / sharp s shall now have an uppercase form. From the comments there, I learn further that codepoint U+1E9E has already been assigned to this character. Will the default collation used for upper-case be changed to map U+00DF to U+1E9E? I notice that lower-case already maps U+1E9E to U+00DF, in the version 7.9 on my disk. (Am I already that far out of date? Sigh.) best regards, Michael Sperberg-McQueen -- **************************************************************** * C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC * http://www.blackmesatech.com * http://cmsmcq.com/mib * http://balisage.net ****************************************************************