Ulfilas

Ulfilas, used for a print of the Gothic bible.

Ulfilas (after Bishop Wulfila, the creator of the Gothic alphabet) is the most extensive of my Gothic fonts. There are four typefaces: standard, bold, italic, and bold-italic. To allow writing in programs 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.

To satisfy today’s requirements, this font contains uppercase- as well as lowercase letters, although there were only capital letters in historic Gothic. The minuscules of this font 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. The relation between Latin and Greek upper- and lowercase letters gave me further aid.

Accordingly, the Gothic Unicode range has room for either upper- or lowercase letters, but not for both. Hence, 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 holding shift.

Character Set and Typefaces

OpenType Features

Ulfilas contains several ligatures that are set automatically if the OpenType feature “liga” is activated:

Text Example

Beginning of the Gospel of St. Luke (after Streitberg’s reading):

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