Re: Query on UTF-32 encodings for letters

[espie at quatramaran dot ens dot fr (Marc Espie)]

In article <41EC1378.40408@adacore.com> you write:
>That is a (very commonly held) myth. Even many French people think this, but
>it is wholly false. The true situation is that in classical typography,
>upper case letters were always accented. Then typewriters came along and
>it became customary to omit the accents. So widespread did this custom
>become that many french schools taught that this was the preferred rule.
>However, formally typeset material continued to use accents on upper
>case letters. But this was never official usage. In fact I had a friend
>Pascal Cleve (there is an accent grave over the first e), whose father
>was denied some government benefit on the grounds that his name was
>spelled wrong in his passport (without the accent). He bounced back
>and forth between govt departments until finally the passport department
>got the first typewriter in France that could put accents on upper case
>letters.

To corroborate your point, there is one fairly known set of printed 
typographic rules, _les regles de l'imprimerie nationale_ (accents
omitted) that does mention this, among other things.  Omitting accents
over uppercase letters is in fact a spelling mistake. One fairly
common thanks to cheap typography and uneducated people, but still
a mistake.

It's likely we are waging a lost battle though, since quite a few people
have now seen more documents without accents over uppercase letters than
correct documents, and like lemmings, they will go on typesetting stuff
the wrong way---usually with Word and Microsoft's comic sans typeface
for greater effect...