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Comment by wolfi1 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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