Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Fraktur
Summary
Fraktur (fʁakˈtuːɐ̯) is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. Letters are designed such that the individual strokes are broken apart; in this way it is often contrasted with the curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces where the letters are designed to flow and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion. The word "Fraktur" derives from Latin frāctūra ("a break"), built from frāctus, passive participle of frangere ("to break"), the same root as the English word "fracture".
Fraktur was often characterised as "the German typeface" because it remained popular in Germany and Eastern Europe for rather longer than elsewhere. In Germany, transition to more modern typefaces was controversial until 1941 when use of Fraktur typefaces was ended by (Nazi) government order. In non-professional contexts, the term "Fraktur" is sometimes (mis)applied to all of the blackletter typefaces. (The term "Gothic" is also sometimes used this way—likewise a misuse, for in formal typography the term "Gothic" means sans-serif.)
Besides the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, Fraktur usually includes the Eszett in the form, vowels with umlauts, and the long s . Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda, and many include a variety of ligatures which are left over from cursive handwriting and have rules for their use. Most older Fraktur typefaces make no distinction between the majuscules and (where the common shape is more suggestive of a ), even though the minuscules and are differentiated.
One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the lower case , the left part of the bow is broken, but the right part is not. In Danish texts composed in Fraktur, the letter was already preferred to the German and Swedish in the 16th century.
In the Latvian variant of Fraktur, used mainly until the 1920s, there are additional characters used to denote Latvian letters with diacritical marks.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.