Open Radar

 
The alphabet for the german language contains the letter ß (U+00DF, latin small sharp s). A long time this letter didn't have a official uppercase variant in Unicode or Latin1. The traditional workaround in german orthography was to use "SS" or "SZ" instead.

This wasn't ideal for all use cases, especially proper names. As an example: the names "Meissner" and "Meißner" are clearly different.  So german typographers often invented a glyph for a Capital Sharp S. In the 2000s an unicode code point for this character was registered and published in Unicode 5.1. Since then a lot of fonts included a glyph for this char.More background information can be found in Wikipedia and its references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ẞ

(And: Just days ago the Council for German Orthography published a recommendation, making the use of ẞ "legal" where previous the "ß→SS" rule would have been used.)

MacOS’ system font in β1 of High Sierra displays a glyph in the form of a ligature of "SS" for the character "ẞ". This is wrong.

The whole point of introducing the ẞ into typography was to have an ability to difference between an uppercased "ss" and and uppercased "ß". Apple removes the users ability to use this difference. No other font that I know of renders the Capital Sharp S as a ligature of SS.

And it leads to absurd paradoxes: the attached screenshot of Wikipedia shows different rendered glyphs in the address bar (system font, the absurd ligature) and the title of the article in Wikipedias default font (a capital sharp s).