Antoine Pitrou <report@bugs.python.org> wrote on Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:04:56 -0000: 

>> Neither am I.  Even in "old-style" English with ae and oe, one wrote
>> ÆGYPT and ÆSIR all caps but Ægypt and Æsir in titlecase, not *Aegypt or
>> *Aesir.  Similarly with ŒNOLOGY / Œnology / œnology, never *Oenology.

> Trying to disprove you a bit:
> http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51G6CH9XFFL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
> http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51k7TmosPdL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
> http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518UzMeLFCL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

> but classical typographies seem to write either the uppercase Πor the
> lowercase œ.

That's what I meant: one only ever sees œufs or ŒUFS, never OEUFS.
French doesn't fit into ISO 8859-1.  That's one of the changes to
ISO-8859-15 compared with ISO-8859-1 (and Unicode):

    iso-8859-1   A4  ⇔  U+00A4  ＜ ¤ ＞  \N{CURRENCY SIGN}
    iso-8859-15  A4  ⇒  U+20AC  ＜ € ＞  \N{EURO SIGN}

    iso-8859-1   A6  ⇔  U+00A6  ＜ ¦ ＞  \N{BROKEN BAR}
    iso-8859-15  A6  ⇒  U+0160  ＜ Š ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON}

    iso-8859-1   A8  ⇔  U+00A8  ＜ ¨ ＞  \N{DIAERESIS}
    iso-8859-15  A8  ⇒  U+0161  ＜ š ＞  \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON}

    iso-8859-1   B4  ⇔  U+00B4  ＜ ´ ＞  \N{ACUTE ACCENT}
    iso-8859-15  B4  ⇒  U+017D  ＜ Ž ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH CARON}

    iso-8859-1   B8  ⇔  U+00B8  ＜ ¸ ＞  \N{CEDILLA}
    iso-8859-15  B8  ⇒  U+017E  ＜ ž ＞  \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON}

    iso-8859-1   BC  ⇔  U+00BC  ＜ ¼ ＞  \N{VULGAR FRACTION ONE QUARTER}
    iso-8859-15  BC  ⇒  U+0152  ＜ Œ ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE}

    iso-8859-1   BD  ⇔  U+00BD  ＜ ½ ＞  \N{VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF}
    iso-8859-15  BD  ⇒  U+0153  ＜ œ ＞  \N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE}

    iso-8859-1   BE  ⇔  U+00BE  ＜ ¾ ＞  \N{VULGAR FRACTION THREE QUARTERS}
    iso-8859-15  BE  ⇒  U+0178  ＜ Ÿ ＞  \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS}

> That said, I wonder why Unicode even includes ligatures like ff. Sounds
> like mission creep to me (and horrible annoyances for people like us).

I'm pretty sure that typographic ligatures are there for roundtripping
with legacy encodings.  I believe that œ/Œ is the only code point
with ligature in its name that you're "supposed" to still use, and
that all others should be figured out by modern fonting software.

--tom