German WWII military symbols

[salexgit]

Hi

Firstly, great work for implementing NATO symbols for LaTeX - a solid piece of work with very diligent documentation!

I have been also looking for a way to produce documents with German WWII symbols. The overall concept is very similar to NATO symbols with the major difference is that Germans used different symbols and followed different rules on how to structure them.

I was able to find so far a set of TrueType fonts for some of the German symbols, see the section with "other fonts".
http://www.mapsymbs.com/fontstuf.html

Regards, Alex

[ralphieraccoon]

Hi Alex!

This is a great idea. If you can find a "manual of style" for construction of these symbols in the same vein as APP6-C for NATO, I can certainly look at adding this.

[salexgit]

Hi

Thanks a lot for a quick and the positive response!

The easiest way to get basics of the German military symbols is to take a look at the "WW2 German Map Marking Font pack" package at the mapsymbs site. The package contains two word documents with a quick summary of symbols and how to use them. It can be a good starting point...

However, the aforementioned package contains only a small subset of symbols, whereas the full set is much more complex. I found unclassified US documents dated back to 1943 which provides a comprehensive guide (153 pages) on what those symbols are. The appendix also shows how Germans were strucuting those symbols to represent higher level formations.
https://archive.org/details/GermanMilitarySymbols1943

There are also other documents on the Internet which describes only the most commonly used symbols. If I find a good link, I will send it to you.

If you decide to design the LaTeX package for these symbols, I will be more than happy to assist in testing and developing it. We can also try to leverage Tom Muat skills - it seems that he has been quite enthusiastic in developing new glyphs :)

Regards, Alex

[ralphieraccoon]

Hi,

The guide looks pretty comprehensive, will have a look to see what kind of logic they use to construct the symbols. The nice thing about the NATO symbols is most of them follow the same kind of template where they're made up of a frame with main, upper and lower symbols. I'm not sure if the WW2 German system was a bit more arbitrary, which might make it take longer to make.

At the moment I'm pretty occupied with other things, so I'll come back to this when I have some more time.

[salexgit]

Hi

Sorry for the delayed response... I agree that NATO symbols are easier in a sense that they share the same pattern and can be unified. On the contrary to it, German symbols are indeed more arbitrary. If I have time, I will take a closer look at them, maybe there is a way to construct some common pattern.

Regards, Alex

[salexgit]

Hi again

I found quite a nice summary of German military symbols, which can be used as a potential baseline for building German symbols in a systematic way.
http://niehorster.org/011_germany/symbols/_symbols_43.html

If I got it right, German military symbols had several revisions, whereupon at the end they became more unified and structured.