Skeirs

Skeirs Minuskel, used for screen display, showing the Gothic Wikipedia.

Skeirs (Goth. “clear”) is an Arial-like sans serif font especially suited for screen display. As the Gothic Unicode range doesn’t allow space for both upper- and lowercase letters, I’ve placed the uppercase letters into the private use area. When using the Gothic keyboard layouts offered here as well, they can be accessed as usual by pressing shift.

In historic Gothic there were only capital Letters. This font’s minuscules have been derived from those majuscules. Doing so wasn’t particularly difficult as the Codex Argenteus’ uncial script already shows attempts of ascenders and descenders. Further aid was given to me by the relation between Latin upper- and lowercase letters. Developing those minuscules appeared necessary in order to achieve a well-tempered appearance of texts containing both Latin and Gothic script.

Skeirs contains 228 characters and an attached system of OpenType rules, by which letters at the beginning of a sentence are rendered capital, as far as the programme used supports the so-called OpenType-Features. In this case, also “I” and “ı” at a word’s beginning are substituted by “Ï” and “ï” automatically. When using the Gothic keyboard layout offered at this site, the majuscules can as well be manually typed by holding shift.

Additionally, Skeirs includes a complete set of Germanic runes.

Character set of Skeirs

Text Example

Entry for “Gutarazda” (Goth. “Gothic language”) at the Gothic Wikipedia:

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This font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License OFL-1.1.