3 ms·
He was imitating (some, mostly liturgical) handwritten books at the time. One of the goals during the creation of the books was to show that he could approach t
by arrrg 13y ago
He was imitating (some, mostly liturgical) handwritten books at the time. One of the goals during the creation of the books was to show that he could approach the quality of expensive handwritten books at the time at a fraction of the price. It’s not like just printing something is really complex technology (I, too, carved potato stamps in kindergarden), but approaching the quality of the gold standard at the time while still keeping the price lower was the hard problem.
While the typeface has some issues (m, n, u, i all look confusingly similar when next to each other, for example) I think the issue may just be that you are not used to reading it. This particular typeface is about 500 years out of fashion so you were never really confronted with it.
- Someone 13y agoI know there are many many subtleties in "X is easier to read than Y" (capitals vs lowercase, ligatures vs no ligatures, black on white vs yellow on black, etc) claims, but surely, blackletter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter) must be harder to read than modern writing. I can't find a paper on that, though. It probably would be hard to find subjects with equal experience reading that and modern writing.
- rixx 13y agoI can't confirm that. I grew up learning blackletter first (since my mother didn't want me to get bored in school too quickly) and after a few minutes of getting used to it again, it's not at all harder to read to me than modern writing. Some letters, like the ſ, aren't that easy to get used to, but when you do get used to them they actually help you (or, well, help me) read faster. That is, I think, because letters with an ascender are easily identified, and ſ (a different form for s) is actually very common in those texts.