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Antiqua–Fraktur dispute
- card_zero 2mo agoThis 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) 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.
- jdnier 2mo agoSeriously, wow.
- vintermann 2mo agoA pioneer in virtual reality technology, that Maximilian.
- RealityVoid 2mo agoThe OG NFT.
- bradrn 2mo ago> the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I It’s interesting to learn that Fraktur itself only dates back to the 16th century — the broader blackletter family of scripts goes back 400 years earlier than that, and was once used across the whole of western Europe.
- MichaelZuo 2mo agoConsidering how much more expensive woodcutting and printing were in the early 1500s… couldn’t he have just built an actual tirumphal arch (albeit simplified) with that money?
- vrganj 2mo agoProbably. But you would only have one of those in your empire and your populace wasn't super mobile back then, so the audience would be limited. This on the other hand, you could put up all over the place.
- AlotOfReading 2mo agoPart of the point was to hand out copies to wealthy allies as a visible sign of favor. Physical arches are a little bit harder to dole out that way, or distribute around the nation. It was also cutting edge technology in a way simple arches weren't.
- ajb 2mo agoI guess part of the point is that it's not subject to the constraints of what you could actually do, so you can make it even more impressive. It's propaganda, after all.
- hasley 2mo agoToday, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.
- eru 2mo agoAlas, yes. (Though compare the Anarchistische Pogo Partei Deutschlands.) Of course, these wannabe guys use the proper fraktur. They usually use the wrong s and don't care about proper ligatures.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoThe APPD is using Fraktur in the punk rock tradition, which I think is from the UK, where using an "enemy" font had shock value.
- Tangurena2 2mo agoIs this why some heavy metal groups use umlauts all over?
- reverius42 2mo agoLike Blue Öyster Cult?
- GuestFAUniverse 2mo agoSame fun when they couldn't decide if they were for or against Sütterlin scripture. They also like to drive Simson motorcycles. Despite the Simson family being Jewish (and publicly calling out against the AfD). They dress with "Fred Perry" -- look it up yourself, how paradox that is. The right-wing likes to talk about the German heritage of the "Dichtern and Denker" (poets and thinkers) and yet the Third Reich was stupid enough to kill or at least exile most. They like to talk about /clean blood/, /natural order/ despite biology having a different opinion which it clearly shows when inbreeding happens (also due to xenophobia). Their /family values/ are indistinguishable from the islamists they pretend to fight. ... The list of paradoxes never ends. ... You cannot argue with stupids
- skrebbel 2mo agoI love learning that Hitler had an opinion about fonts and ranted about them in the Reichstag.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoHe was a failed artist and bohemian before his uhm "success".
- pantalaimon 2mo agohttps://img2.spoki.lv/upload/articles/28/284140/images/Hipster-Hitler-5.jpg https://img2.spoki.lv/upload/articles/28/284140/images/Hipst...
- leoc 2mo agoIt's not surprising though. Branding, marketing and style seem to have been his core competences.
- liotier 2mo agoRemember December 2025, when Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor's decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move ?
- maratc 2mo agoIn a choice of either Times New Roman or Calibri, I would think that Times fits the US State Dept better. Calibri is a relaxed, modern typeface, while Times is classical and majestic. (The word "stately" also comes to mind.) It would probably be better if State Department would get their own typeface -- as opposed to picking one from MS Office defaults -- but even then, I'd argue for Antiqua style (serif). SCOTUS, for one, is using Century Schoolbook. P.S. I don't care at all about Rubio, Dem-Rep divide, "diversity" vs "wastefulness" debate, or any of the arguments brought from either side in 2023 (when they changed Times to Calibri) or 2025 (when they switched back).
- hamper653 2mo agoIn what way is Times New Roman more "stately"?
- JsonDemWitOster 2mo agoSerif fonts in general are more formal (or "stately"). That's because of the, well, serifs. Sans-serifs visually resemble/evoke handwriting because in handwriting we don't make serifs. Try writing with serifs for everyday stuff and it will quickly reveal to be visually and logistically annoying. The only question is which brand of formal do you want to evoke. TNR feels very straightforward and no-nonsense to me. So I wouldn't really object to associating it with bureaucratic memos and documents. For something more leisurely I'd go with either Garamond or Georgia. Georgia is my favorite but it's a bit too fancy for long texts. It's better suited for quotes. As an aside, I hate that Introduction to Algorithms [CORMEN] uses a TNR-like font. It makes it look like a Physics textbook. They could've stayed with default Computer Modern and strengthened my Pavlovian conditioning to it. Whenever I read something in Computer Modern, my heart palpitates a little in the way it did when I sat through my Data Structures exams.
- wolfi1 2mo agoBTW, 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)
- petesergeant 2mo agoThe Wikipedia article suggests that preventing short-sightedness was touted as a feature of Fraktur, so it seems both sides were keen on this argument
- WillAdams 2mo agoInterestingly, the eye complaint was a recurring one about various novel typefaces, esp. see Benjamin Franklin's autobiography where he substitutes text set in Caslon (the old approved standard) for Baskerville (the upstart the person he was with didn't like).
- doubletwoyou 2mo agoAs a person with an eye not especially trained for typography, these two typefaces appear too remarkably similar to be quarreled over. I’m sure those with stronger type setting preferences would disagree, but I find it funny how much humans can debate over things that appear minute and mundane to others (cf. https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/)
- WillAdams 2mo agoThe thing is, the subtle distinctions do seem to matter in terms of reader acceptance and comprehension, at least in my experience of setting type. Like most things, it's a gradient/continuum, and achieving true excellence is the result of iterating and testing until all decisions/selections are correct.
- inejge 2mo ago> Oliver Heaviside [...] even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur Well Heaviside was a bit of a kook, especially in his later years, and that claim seems entirely in character :) My contacts with Fraktur are intermittent and brief, so I don't really have an opinion; I mostly encounter it in an old German-English dictionary which I occasionally consult, where the German text is printed in Fraktur. I don't have too many problems reading it.
- pm3003 2mo agoIt 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.
- ogogmad 2mo agoSee also the Blackletter imitation "bastard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_(typeface): The face is available in three weights: Spindly Bastard, Fat Bastard, and Even Fatter Bastard.
- lmf4lol 2mo agoI love Fraktur so much. When I look for books from Germans pre ww2, I always go for the ones in Fraktur. The aesthetic is so beautiful and pleasing. Just yesterday, I acquired two books , one from Schopenhauer and one from Kant in prints from 1860 and 1890 respectively. Still looking for a Faust in Fraktur, but they are really expensive … f*ck Hitler for banning Fraktur. it would be awesome if we Germans would still use it.
- nxobject 2mo agoIt's hilarious how this dispute captures the assumptions of each period... the 19th-century debate is completely unrecognizable.
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 2mo agoMy 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.