>Minor quibble: the transition date was somewhat earlier, if you consider >practice in Germany to be authoritative for the German language. Use of a >more conventional Roman font for German was one of Hitler's minor reforms, >if I recall correctly.
According to "Five Centuries of German Fraktur" by Walden Font found on the net, use was starting to decrease after WWI, but Hitler declared it the true "Aryan" font. However, in 1941, it was starting to get in the way with communicating with German vassal states, so it was "of Jewish origin". That had little effect during the war, due to economic difficulties. >More major quibble: I'm surprised that someone with serious background in >German hadn't been exposed to Fraktur fonts. Serious background may be a little strong. He needed a foriegn language for his English major, and picked German. I can get through Fraktur, but I have a special interest in scripts and fonts and have studied it some. I wonder, if Germany still used Fraktur in the modern day, whether there would be insistance on it being seperate in Unicode. Despite Evan's comment, most sources I've seen make plain-text-level distinctions between German/Fraktur and English/Roman, consistently. I don't believe the distinction would be made, but it would be a point of contention, IMO. -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
