Pfeffer Mediæval, used for display of a page from the Skeireins.
Pfeffer Mediæval inter alia comprises a character set for Gothic, inclusive of upper- and lowercase letters. Note that this — just as little as in Ulfilas, Skeirs and Midjungards — is not a historic occurrence of the Gothic script. When Carolingian minuscule emerged about 800 A.D., the Visigothic kingdom in Spain had long since succumbed to the Arab onslaught. Hence, a vivid Gothic oral or literal culture had ceased to exist in Europe at least since 711 A.D. The Gothic character set of Pfeffer Mediæval is rather meant as a hypothetic reconstruction of what Gothic literature might have looked like if it still had been in bloom.
As is the case with Skeirs and Ulfilas, the Gothic Unicode range of Pfeffer Mediæval is mapped with minuscules, while the majuscules find themselves in the private use area. They can either be accessed by using the Gothic keyboard layouts offered here or by activating the OpenType feature described below.
By activating stylistic set “ss03” the Latin letters are substituted by their Gothic equivalents (whereas Hvair and Þiuþ have to be already set in Latin text or to be typed as special characters). Thus, in programmes that support OpenType features it is possible to make use of the Gothic alphabet without having to install the above-mentioned Gothic keyboard layouts. This especially suggests itself where only a few text passages are to be set in Gothic script.
From a ‘late manuscript’ of the Skeireins. Citations from the gospel of St. John are coloured red while the Gothic commentary is written in black:
| File | Description |
| pfeffer_mediaeval.zip | A Carolingian minuscule font with a vast character set. |
| pfeffer_mediaeval_g.zip | The same font with Gothic letters instead of the Latin ones (for programmes that don’t support the Gothic Unicode range). |
