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  • It makes me laugh every time that the Nazis' Glorious Germanic Heritage of the Aryan Masterrace Ancestors Fraktur script turned out to have been created by Jewish printers and they went "Nevermind, forget it" then choose Antiqua, which, to be frank, is not the most adapted typeface for small printed folio books and papers of the time (and still isn't today).

    I didin't know that Hitler personnally disliked Fraktur, must have helped.

    Fraktur needs some eye adaptation to read it fluently because we are not used to some ligatures anymore and the typographic conventions can be different in the late 18th / early 19th century (for instance the Grimm brothers advocated against the captitalization of German common names), but I find it quite legible.

    by pm3003
  • See also the Blackletter imitation "bastard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_(typeface): The face is available in three weights: Spindly Bastard, Fat Bastard, and Even Fatter Bastard.
    by ogogmad
  • I love learning that Hitler had an opinion about fonts and ranted about them in the Reichstag.
    by skrebbel
  • It's hilarious how this dispute captures the assumptions of each period... the 19th-century debate is completely unrecognizable.
    by nxobject
  • Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.
    by hasley
  • My high school English teacher chose Baskerville for the yearbook. This was back in the days when letterpress was still hanging on. Offset was mostly for short print runs. Both processes produced very fine resolution.

    I remember when 300 dpi was a Xerox selling point while IBM was stuck at 240 for high speed printing. Now my cheap Brother does 600.

    Serif fonts look better with higher dpi. Garamond tolerates lower dpi than modern serif fonts with finer features and curvatures.

    I have a soft spot for Optima which is (was?) Xerox' official font, which coincidentally worked well on its printers.

    by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
  • BTW, Oliver Heaviside campaigned against Fraktur "German letters must go!" and I have to admit the do not look really good in math formulas, at least to my taste. He even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur (I didn't find the quote on the internet, so I have to look that up in my library if anyone is interested)
    by wolfi1
  • This led me to look up the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I for this extraordinary thing:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_Arch_(woodcut)

    Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.

    by card_zero

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