Silubr, applied for reconstruction of a page from the Codex Argenteus (Mk. 3, 27–32).
Silubr (Goth. “silver”) is a bold and contrasting Gothic uncial script related to the hand script of ancient Gothic codices. Its name is derived from the silver ink used for the Codex Argenteus. Silubr is probably the most original of all the fonts offered here. It includes 35 characters. This is quite a modest number, but the missing part can easily be complemented from other bold typefaces (e. g. “Poster Bodoni”).
To allow writing with this font in programmes that don’t support the high Gothic Unicode range (as for example MS Word), the Gothic characters are mapped to the Latin range as well. And in order to render texts in Silubr that distinguish between upper and lower case letters, this font’s Latin majuscules and minuscules are equally mapped with Gothic glyphs.
Silubr is compatible with those fonts offered here that have a more extensive character set. If a text is set from Ulfilas or Skeirs into Silubr, characters not included in Silubr — such as accents — are simply omitted (instead of being displayed as boxes).
Further, Silubr makes use of the “hist” feature for historical text layout. If activated, a historically more original typeface is generated automatically: Spaces are omitted, punctuation is reduced to mid-dot and colon, and a diaeresis is added to an “I” at the beginning of a word (whilst in the mid of a word, at the beginning of a syllable, a diaeresis should already be set). In order to make this feature available in Microsoft Word 2010 (which supports just a few OpenType features, including the stylistic sets), I’ve added a copy of this feature as stylistic set “ss05”.
The following illustration shall demonstrate both:
into Silubr
with “hist” (or “ss05”)
Reconstruction of a page (Mk. 3, 27–32) from the already mentioned Silver Bible:
Here the original for comparison:
| File | Description |
| silubr.zip | A Gothic boldface in the style of ancient Gothic codices. |
