Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Yannis Haralambous
U. F. R. de MathCmatiques,
UniversitC de Lille - Flandres - Artois,
59655 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France.
Abstract
Typesetting in the old style, with the corresponding types,
besides being an art, is also a real pleasure. METAFONT allows
the creation of faithful copies of these types and T&K gives the
possibility of using them in the most traditional manner. In
this spirit, the necessary fonts and macros to typeset in the Old
German types: Gotisch (also called Textur), Schwabacher and
F'raktur are presented in this paper, together with an historical
introduction to each of them. Also, a set of initials is described.
Rules for typesetting in these types are given, together with
extracts from the original sources.
Proceedings of W 9 O
Yannis Haralambous
Schwabacher
The name comes from Schwabach, a little German
town in the south of Niirnberg. According to
Updike [1927].
in fifteenth century German gothic or black-
letter fonts, a differentiation of type-faces
klmnopqr began to show itself, as we have seen, in the
last twenty years of the century, between
Ls t w b b r p ~
For all old German types. there is no distinction
types that were somewhat pointed and a
rounder, more cursive gothic letter, with
between I and J ; also there are two kinds of s: the certain peculiarities - the closed a, looped
middle and initial "long s" and the final "short s:" b, dl h, and 1, and a tailed f a n s s. The first
type was called "fraktur." The second was
Ls ultimately known as "schwabacher. "
In composite words, a short s is used when some Schwabacher was in some extent the "bold-
component of the word ends on s: face" font, compared to the usual Fraktur. The
font presented here is called yswab. It is based
on lgth century types. Nevertheless, some charac-
Since it's almost impossible for a computer to know ters (such as the "Hebrew-like" question mark 2 )
if some s is long or short, you have to do it manually; have been taken from a contemporary book: A.
type s : for a short s, like in Aus: gang or Alles :. Wikenhauser [1948], Das Evangelium nach Johan-
The following ligatures are part of the font: nes. where John's text is written in Schwabacher
and comments in Fraktur. Here are the basic upper
and lowercase characters:
abcbefg@ijEImn
opqre ftuvwrp3.
~PpePJ@QlgJ The following ligatures are included in the font:
R f l i f t f kbthr ff, fJ'
Beside the ones shown above, there are variant a, f f l I T 1 121
For the vowels e , o , u with Umlaut, you have
forms the choice between two forms: for the older one ( a
small "en over the letter) you need to type a * +
at positions '052, '057, '075 of the font. Because of vowel combination, and for the newer one a " +
vowel combination. So, by typing *a, *e, *o: *u:
the many ligatures. there is no place left for special
"a. "e, "0, "u, you get
characters (I used only 128-character fonts). You'll
have to switch to CM for #, $, %, &. *. +$,=. etc.
dt6uii20ii
For the vowels a, e, o, u with Umlaut and for the 8, respectively.
I followed Partl's [I9881 convention: just type " a ,
" e , " 0 , " u , " s (e is used in Flemish) to obtain: Fraktur
diiifit. The first Fraktur type was created by Johann
The difference with Partl's approach is that Schonsperger in Augsburg to typeset the book of
in our case "a, "e, etc.. are ligatures. Since 8 prayers of Kaiser Maximilian (1513). Some years
historically comes from the ligature s+z (8 is called later, Hieronymus Andreae created a new Fraktur
es-zet), by typing either " s or s z , you get the same type, used by Diirer for the printing of his theoretical
output. works. In the 17th century, Fraktur had a period
In Appendix A you can find a sample of the of decline. It was only in the fall of the l a t h
font: it is an extract of Luther's Bible (1534), in the century that some progressive typographers like
original orthograph. G. I. Breitkopf and J. F. Unger gave Fraktur a new
breath, by creating new fonts with the aesthetic
Proceedings of W 9 O
Typesetting Old German
Proceedings of W 9 O
Yannis Haralambous
Proceedings of m 9 O
Typesetting Old German
Proceedings of m 9 0
Y (pragr gfr(ft nidjt
rvn ref ]Jraim . t ganpn ant <!l(rr?
ttt iaer @rrb unn 0 vnn n
gegunn n ]Jltt. a rr (ofrrt;
rvor gt non vom at a nu jon antt ham; ggrr
lJbt " nrrv ounr man; Irv vom rrn untt bJarrn m unn
fagn nan rr (pj n ktu Irr gebt
"Vorur mvr ift rttJ fbran;n m
iagrtrn honigrninian n Zafmftna g
huh Zarm
h n; r Cr CoITrn bg? on (pra
ofan rnn to unn Zarmuna vnn ttl gibt bJtll i
t r tTrrn atrr un unn mit
b n rr 50 non ovnad unn rrt
Appendix B
Proceedings of W 9 O
Yannis Haralambous
Appendix C
Proceedings of W 9 O
Typesetting Old German
Appendix D
Late Breaking News
I would like to thank Frau Franziska Kaiser Rather a sad way for such a beautiful type to
for finding me (after many attempts) a copy of the die, especially if one considers all the masterpieces
official order of the German Nazist Party, abolishing of the first centuries of typography! Of course the
Fraktur and Schwabacher from all printed items. real reasons of this event -which occured exactly
The argumentation given is typical of the Nazist 50 years ago- are not the ones mentionned in
Party (antisemitic and illogical) : the document ... perhaps historians will find them
"...It i s ordered that from n o w o n only the some day. My personal opinion is that even if an
n o r m a l type is t o be used for all printed documents. analogous reform would be applied sooner or later
A s normal type, the antiqua type i s meant. T h e so- it should have a completely different argumentation
called gothic type (Fraktur) is n o t a german type but (for example the readability of Fraktur in com-
goes back t o the schwabacher jew-letters. T h i s type parison to Antiqua) and should leave printers the
h a s been strongly used i n G e r m a n y because Jews freedom of choice: uniformization by force always
owned the printing works already since typography brings flatness and sterility.
w a s introduced, and later o n the newspapers ..."
Proceedings of w 9 O
Yannis Haralambous
Proceedings of W 9 O