Antiqua–Fraktur dispute | Hacker News Reader

Antiqua–Fraktur dispute

en.wikipedia.org

159 pointsbuzzy_hacker76 comments

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.

Seriously, wow.

A pioneer in virtual reality technology, that Maximilian.

The OG NFT.

> 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.

Considering 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?

Probably. 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.

Part 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.

I 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.

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)

Interestingly, 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).

As 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/)

The 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.

The Wikipedia article suggests that preventing short-sightedness was touted as a feature of Fraktur, so it seems both sides were keen on this argument

> 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.

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.

Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.

Alas, 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.

The APPD is using Fraktur in the punk rock tradition, which I think is from the UK, where using an "enemy" font had shock value.

Is this why some heavy metal groups use umlauts all over?

Like Blue Öyster Cult?

Same 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

I’m in the process of learning Sütterlin / Kurrent for genealogical purposes. While Fraktur is easy to learn, Kurrent is just horrible, even though the textbook I used, written in 1995, still declares it a superior handwriting cruelly banned by the Nazis.

A lot of them use "Olde English" style blackletter fonts instead of German Fraktur, possibly because they can't read it.

If you read the article, it's ideologically consistent - the main motivation in abandoning Fraktur was strategic (i.e. military), not ideological. I'm pretty sure the "actually Fraktur is Jewish" argument wouldn't even have come up if Hitler and Goebbels hadn't already pushed for adopting Latin script. The Nazis weren't exactly pragmatists but they were always opportunists.

Also the modern far-right in Germany has an undercurrent of monarchists, we've just lost the political language to label them as such - much like how we unironically refer to conservatives as "centrists" because referring to anyone but a nazi as "right-wing" is often implied to have certain undertones, although the conservative party that helped pass the Enabling Act was literally called the Christian Center Party.

And although the Nazis weren't exactly ideologically coherent - fascists generally aren't - the driving ideology in the modern German far-right (including within the AfD) is actually völkisch nationalism which the Nazis were at least making heavy use of in their propaganda.

I'd even argue remnants of völkisch nationalism even made it into the German constitution: it uses the term Volk and Volkszugehöriger (in Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG) without defining either of them. The definition of Volk instead had to be provided by a constitutional court ruling - German citizens plus Volkszugehörige - and that second term is defined in a seperate law (§ 6 BVFG) which uses a very narrow and arbitrary definition that's clearly a condensed bureaucratic remnant of a much broader ideological pre-existing definition (arguably the consequence of having to deal with a similar problem as laws trying to combat racism that want to avoid validating "race science" by pinning down exact definitions for each relevant category)[0].

Also in German popular culture the colloquial definition of "Deutsch" seems to be very much colored by völkisch ideas: someone who is "ethnically distinct" (e.g. skin color, eye shape) is generally regarded as a "migrant"/"foreigner" even if they are German citizens, speak fluent German, are culturally German and have multiple generations of direct ancestors who lived in Germany.

[0] Source: Bundestag white paper "Zu den Begriffen „deutsches Volk“, „Deutsche“ und deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit“ im Grundgesetz":

https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/643190/7855da277bbd33...

References:

Art. 116 GG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_116.html

§ 6 BVFG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bvfg/__6.html

> If you read the article, it's ideologically consistent - the main motivation in abandoning Fraktur was strategic (i.e. military), not ideological.

But that isn't quite what it says either. Pragmatic considerations may have given the decisive push, but it seems that Gothic script had always been in a precarious position on the faultline between the archaising and modernising instincts of Naziism. The specific tall story that was eventually presented about how it was Jewish was quite clearly a low-effort post-hoc justification, but it seems it was always quite easy to take an anti-Fraktur stance from a Nazi perspective: see A. Hiedler, op. cit. And even just going on the small extract provided from that Reichstag speech https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/luftwaffe... , it seems that Hitler's objections weren't just pragmatic: before he gives a practical reason to drop Fraktur, he attacks Gothic revivalism in general on aesthetic grounds, no small matter to the Nazis. My assumption is that his objection to Gothic revivalism was based partly on a general aesthetic instinct that too much revivalism is cosplay and naff; and partly on a disapproval of medieval Germany specifically as a model or claimed precursor for Nazi Germany, for various reasons. A possible third, type-specific, factor, mentioned in https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/luftwaffe... , is that compared to "Atiqua" "Fraktur" looks vaguely kinda more Hebrew-ish. That could plausibly have been the underlying sentiment behind the (apparently completely false and baseless https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/nazi-typeface-fraktu... ) story spun about Jewish printers in Schwabach.

That's why I said "main motivation", i.e. what actually caused them to follow through. The initial idea wasn't ideological either - not following from ideology doesn't mean it's pragmatic (in fact I'd argue those two aspects are orthogonal) and that it wasn't born out of pragmatism only reaffirms my statement that the Nazis were opportunists, not pragmatists.

A lot of things boiled down to post-hoc ideological justifications for the personal preferences of Hitler and his ilk. Even the racism was incoherent - it's cliché to point this out but Hitler himself infamously looked nothing like an Aryan übermensch despite the Führer cult treating him akin to a divine figure. This is consistent with research indicating disgust as a strong motivating signal in right-wing politics.

> Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.

And many of them use Fraktur wrongly (in particular: wrong usage of long vs round s; not using compulsory ligatures).

Oh yes, let's grammar-nazi the nazis.

not /s

I don't think it's an attempt at correcting neo-nazis, but rather indirectly says that they only seem to use it as a signal: they don't care about (proper) use at all, just want to associate themselves with a (glorious?) past through marketing.

It’s a bit like right-wing Christians. They have a very shallow understanding of their sacred texts, but that doesn’t stop them from acting the way they think they should act because of what they misunderstood about Christianity.

I ask in "good faith": Name one thing we shallowly misundersand.

Not the person you ask, but Christians do have a habit of selectively applying scripture. Above all, right-wing Christians seem ill at ease with the bits about turning the other cheek, the good Samaritan, stewardship, greed, etc.

Ostentatious religious behavior (such as public devotion) while ignoring quite a bit of the core message of Christ comes across as shallow. The clearest case is Trump, who has possibly broken all 10 commandments, and commits 6 out of 7 cardinal sins.

Now, associating that with all right-wing Christians is probably a generalization, but this image is not helped by their leaders, and the complete lack of visible opposition against them.

> Oh yes, let's grammar-nazi the nazis.

Using wrong letters and ligatures (in Fraktur) has barely anything to do with grammar; this is rather orthography.

Point 2 in Eco's ur-facism essay:

"The rejection of modernism"

I wonder how much that's due to reverse polarization causing modern far right to copy Nazis from Hollywood or videogame depictions of Nazis, which tended to use Fraktur as a signifier.

“Reversing the polarity of the Nazi field” is some serious Star Trek-level technobabble.

I had a chance of attending a lecture by Albert Kapr, maybe a year or so before he died. His book on typography was, essentially, the "Bible" for anyone studying typography in the 60s-90s in the former Soviet Union, probably still is. Our typography coursework was, essentially, designed on his book's (the Art of Lettering) examples. I've also seen some historical books printed in Germany some preceding Nazi rule, some during and some shortly after.

I'm almost hundred percent sure I've seen Mein Kampf seen set in Schwabacher which was printed while Hitler was still alive, but I'm not sure on the exact year. I'm also certain I've seen Hanns Johst's plays posters set in (stylized) Fractur. I'm sure you can find the Nibelungen posters with the same kind of (stylized) font from that time.

So, at least in the way things are presented in Kapr's book, and I think it was understood that way even before him, Fractur has much to do with the development of printing, especially the part where individual letters were reused (early printing used to etch the entire page at once). Germans would have a reason to be sentimental about that font because, after all, they were the inventors of this kind of printing. I could see how this would be in line with nationalism.

Similar, for example, in Russia, the stylized variant of pre-Peter I (a.k.a. "early Cyrillic" or "church-Cyrillic") is still a popular choice for all sorts of nationalist propaganda posters, even though it was replaced in the late 16 hundreds.

Similar, in Ukraine, there are fonts that strongly associate with nationalism, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_skoropys and Georgij Narbut's font: https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-86142.html even though they are impractical and aren't used for everyday tasks.

In Hebrew, there's Hayim font, that strongly associates with the Zionism / Socialism movement of the pre-declaration of independence and soon after, but the font otherwise isn't very useful for modern everyday needs.

* * *

Bottom line: I don't think Nazis represent the whole spectrum of nationalism. On the other hand, nationalism will find and glorify original local developments, in typography just like in any other field.

My reading of Nazis is that nationalism wasn't their main goal. Their appeal was "law and order at any cost", "removing impediments to prosperity, whatever they may be" much more so than digging up historical relics confirming the eternal greatness of Aryan people. Textbook nationalists are rarely expansionists: they may be hostile to their neighbors having claims to some historically contested territory, but they don't normally launch conquest of far-away lands. The later seems to be more of a thing of people with more universal ideologues.

It's hilarious how this dispute captures the assumptions of each period... the 19th-century debate is completely unrecognizable.

I love learning that Hitler had an opinion about fonts and ranted about them in the Reichstag.

https://img2.spoki.lv/upload/articles/28/284140/images/Hipst...

Should have used Aryal instead.

I have a mug that says Helvetica written in Arial. Almost nobody gets it.

It's not surprising though. Branding, marketing and style seem to have been his core competences.

He was a failed artist and bohemian before his uhm "success".

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.

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.

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

This is an interesting argument for every terminal emulator to implement the Fraktur ANSI escape sequence (which I don’t remember what it is).

Aryan National Standards Institute?

I 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.

Remember 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 ?

In 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).

In what way is Times New Roman more "stately"?

Serif 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.

Georgia is nice, but rather recent. Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon, Century are all centuries old. If we're talking about the US State department, it would probably be fitting to look at the fonts that were used for US printing and communication (and are still used.)

It's hard to explain, but serif typefaces have centuries of history behind them, with practically all the books (in Europe and America) using some variant of serif since basically the invention of movable type. You can add most of newspapers to this list (notably "Times" part comes from a font being cast for the British newspaper The Times in 1930s.) The Roman Empire is a source of these (just look at the inscription on the Pantheon[0]), so that's for the "Roman" part. Using serif fonts signifies "tradition". Using sans-serif signifies "modernity". Being "stately" is more about the former than the latter.

Interestingly, the building that houses the State Dept[1] has its style defined as "Modern Movement" and "Stripped classical", which is interesting, because it's somewhere in the middle between modern and classical, while not being quite any of them. To me, it looks mostly bland; I'd much rather have an office in Congress building, or Supreme Court building, or the White House, all of which are strictly classical.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S_Truman_Building

> Being "stately" is more about the former than the latter.

I can’t help but strongly disagree with that. To me, "stately" would mean something more pragmatic and efficient.

Not going to argue about personal interpretations, and everyone's entitled to have one — including people who have interpretations that we personally disagree with.

Having said that:

    *stately*
    
    adjective
    
    a stately procession. dignified, majestic, ceremonious, courtly, imposing, impressive, solemn, awe-inspiring, regal, imperial, elegant, grand, glorious, splendid, magnificent, resplendent, important, august, formal; slow-moving, measured, deliberate.

Yep, all qualities I wouldn’t associate with "traditional".

But would associate with "pragmatic" and "efficient"?

No, indeed.

> In what way is Times New Roman more "stately"?

See perhaps this article on the various style guides of various US federal courts:

* https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/the_fonts_of_the_us_feder...

Or various other articles:

* "On Fonts: Why Lawyers Should Switch To Century Schoolbook": https://www.ncbarblog.com/on-fonts-why-lawyers-should-switch...

* "Typography for Lawyers": https://typographyforlawyers.com

But to take an extreme example: at least at first glance, how would treat a SCOTUS decision written in Times New Roman versus one written in Comic Sans?

This administration should be restricted to Comic Sans.

But... but... it is staffed by Dingbats.

The use of Century Schoolbook by the Supreme Court is more a matter of their accepting the default selection of the Government Printing Office (GPO) --- before they switched to using Adobe InDesign, their updated design manual was available as a PDF typeset by "ACOMP.exe" (anyone know anything about it? Apparently it was a custom typesetting tool which made PDFs from XML?) which was visually indistinguishable from an earlier edition style guide I had printed during WWII (with a note about paper shortages in it).

See:

https://www.govinfo.gov/collection/gpo-style-manual

and contrast 2000 to 1984 and earlier.

they actually did create their own font for public state affairs, and ist open on GitHub: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans

OK then I have to ask what the EU might have up its sleeve.

https://ec.europa.eu/component-library/eu/guidelines/typogra...

I went thru the Component Library. No treeview !

> I would think that Times fits the US State Dept better.

Any government communication should prioritise readability over “brand alignment”.

The reason almost all books and newspapers use serif typefaces is exactly that: serifs help with readability. It could be argued that serifs help our eye by making each letter more unique, or it can be argued that our eyes have been trained since childhood to read serifs -- by almost all books and newspapers we've consumed. Whatever the cause and the consequence is, serif fonts have advantage on the readability front when we talk about printed communication.

Yes, but they are suboptimal on screens, unless the resolution is very high.

On screens every US government agency already uses sans-serif, as required by "Americans with Disabilities" act[0]. This is not in any way affected by neither previous change from TNR to Calibri, nor by this change from Calibri back to TNR.

[0] https://digital.gov/resources/an-introduction-to-typography

Gruber links to the original copy of the memo that he managed to obtain through 'sources':

* https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...

* Via: https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...

Gruber's commentary:

> Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics.

[…]

> 2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.^2

Gruber is no fan of the Trump administrator generally, but he thinks in this case it seems that they/Rubio got it right.

He also recently had a post on the various style guides of various US federal courts:

* https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/the_fonts_of_the_us_feder...

The utter banality of the fourth reich

Their reasoning has de depth of an oil slick.

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