alt Hacker NewsBTW, 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)
Replies
> 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.
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
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).