Mastering the
Fraktur Problem
Issue 61, 12 February, 2014 5
Germanophiles will be aware that, until quite recent times, most German print works (and some Danish and Norwegian) were set in a Gothic font (styled Fraktur), rather than the Latin font with which most of us are familiar.5 While the use of Fraktur is only mildly confusing to Latin script readers, it plays havoc with modern digital optical-character-recognition (OCR) systems. Texts printed in Fraktur subjected to ordinary OCRing come out as close to garbage.
To date LLMC-Digital offers only a score or so of older German, Danish and Norwegian titles. But now, given our recent expansion of our foreign language handling capacity, we can see many more such titles coming through the pipeline. So it was time to resolve the Fraktur problem. As we attempted this there were some initial complexities involved in making the available OCR Fraktur components work with the LLMC-Digital interface. However, we can now report that those difficulties have been resolved, and that a very serviceable system for OCRing Fraktur is now in place.
Given that, LLMC has gone back and re-OCRed the score or so titles that were already online. We are happy to report that the OCRing came out as “near perfect”; which is the highest standard for OCRing, even for Latin script. In future, of course, all new titles in Fraktur will be flagged during processing and routed through the enhanced OCRing system.
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5This was not done to be perverse. The advocates of Fraktur had arguable grounds for believing that theirs was the superior format. Among various advantages listed in a 1910 textbook for the use of Fraktur were:
• German script is more readable; i.e. the word images are clearer than Latin script.
• German script is more compact in printing; an advantage for fast recognition of word images.
• German script more suitably expresses the Ger-man language, and is more adapted to its charac-teristics than Latin script.
• German script makes it easier for foreigners to understand the German language.
• German script does not cause nearsightedness and is healthier for the eyes than Latin script.
• German script is still prone to development, while Latin script is set in stone.
• German script is understood all over the world, where it is often used as ornamental script.
• Latin script will gradually lose its position as the international script through the progress of the Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Germanic) world.
• The use of Latin script for German language would promote its infestation with foreign words.
• German script does not impede the spread of German language and culture in other countries.
In their time, these arguments were convincing enough for the likes of Otto von Bismark. He even refused to accept gifts of books printed in Latin script. Fatally, however, they did not convince one Adolph Hitler, who took an intense dislike to Fraktur and championed Germany’s conversion to the Latin font. In a 1934 speech to the Reichstag, he predicted: “In a hundred years, our language will be THE European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn OUR language. The prerequisite for this is that the script called Gothic be replaced by the script called Latin.” At least with regard to the demise of Fraktur, Herr Hitler was prophetic. In his Normalschrifterlass of 3 Jan. 1941, Martin Bormann, Nazi Party Chancellor, decreed it wrong to describe the so-called Gothic script as a German script. In reality, the so-called Gothic script consists of SchwabacherJew letters. Just as they later took control of the newspapers…the Jews residing in Germany took control of the printing presses; and thus in Germany the Schwa-bacher Jew letters were forcefully introduced. That threw down the gauntlet, and by 1945 Fraktur had been completely suppressed in German publishing.