There's two variants of old cursive/script lowercase d – rules on usage?

Eimantas Paškonis

A document from 1918. Beginnings of words have traditional /d, while in the middles there's oldstyle version. Seemed like a rule until I found this:



Mistake or exception?
Another question: how would d_d pair would look like? Both oldstyle?

Georg Seifert

If is is a rule, then is is at the begging of a word-piece (Wortstam in German) or kind of syllable. Mostly if you could hyphenate before the 'd', you would us the 'modern' style. This is the same as with the long 's'.

Florian Hardwig

In the period in question, children in German-speaking countries typically learned two different scripts at school, “Lateinisch” (roundhand) and “Deutsch” (Kurrent, a cursive form of Fraktur). These were used side by side, for different purposes. In a nutshell, Kurrent was the default, while “Lateinisch” was used for foreign languages, loan words, but also proper names and other sorts of emphasis. Unsurprisingly, hybrid forms were quite common.

In this roundhand manuscript, the writer introduces the form of ‘d’ that you describe as oldstyle, and which is associated with Kurrentschrift, as a stylistic alternate. There were no rules for this as with ſ/s. The ‘d’ without downstroke simply lends itself more to being used at the end of words, where it can end in a fancy loop. The form with the stem that returns to the baseline may be more suitable when you want to join a subsequent letter like ‘e’ or ‘i’.

The “stemless d” is not exclusive to Kurrent or Fraktur. It can also be spotted in italics like Cochin’s, among others, and even in Antiqua or Grotesk. It is quite common in German (roundhand) script typefaces from the 1950s, like Paul Zimmermann’s Impuls, Heinrich Pauser’s Petra (1954), G.G. Lange’s Boulevard (1955), Georg Trump’s Time Script (1956), or Helmut Matheis’s Verona (1958). Older examples with this form include Walter Höhnisch’s Skizze (1935), Erich Mollowitz’s Forelle (1936), and Carlos Winkow’s Gong (1945).

Eimantas Paškonis

@Georg Seifert @Florian Hardwig What about d_d?

Andreas Stötzner

There is no rule.

> What about d_d?
You decide.
But I’d say there is not much reason for a dd ligature.

Eimantas Paškonis

Not much reason for ligature, but in the d_d pair should both letters be the same style? Which one? If not, which is which?

Nick Shinn

The ‘d’ without downstroke simply lends itself more to being used at the end of words, where it can end in a fancy loop. 

From the Willi Busch graphic novel Drei Märchen (1895).