This letter was created in 2008 and standardized in the german language in 2017, but usage is optional, with "SS" the standard for uppercasing ß. Which makes that new letter the only letter of the german language that is not available on standard german keyboards. Great. Just great. Another perfect use of my taxpayer money.

And no, that special letter is currently not fully supported in my commercial software either, because the font i use for printing invoices on thermal paper doesn't support it.¹

Oh well, that's the german language. To misquote Kennedy: "We speak german, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because that challenge is one that we are forced to accept, one we are unable to postpone, and one we intend to fail at miserably."

And we do. Only a fraction of native german speakers actually speak german. Most (including me) speak a dialect of german. Especially in Austria, my home. When people from different Austrians states meet, it is an awesome thing to listen in. Everybody speaks a completely different dialect, and somehow we mostly manage to understand one another. (If someone joins who has only learned german as a second language, they might be in for a truly baffling experience, though.).

Sidenote: I have seen a few Austrian movies played on German TV stations with german subtitles (notably: "Hinterholz 8"), which was one of the funniest experiences ever.

¹ It's astonishingly hard to find a readable, modern fixed width font that looks good and can be scaled down well enough that you can print all required text on an invoice, when you only have 512 pixels in width, on paper thats only 80mm (3.1 inch) wide. And that is still readable if you scale the image down to 384 pixel (50mm / 1.9 inch) for printing on a mobile bluetooth printer. Searching for a font that can all that and that supports some special letter that nobody uses anyway is an excersice for another decade...

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In reply to Re^4: Memory Leak with XS but not pure C by cavac
in thread Memory Leak with XS but not pure C by FrankFooty

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