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 on my site, the majuscules can as well be manually typed by holding shift.
Additionally, Skeirs includes a complete set of Germanic runes.
If you like this font or if you would like to comment on it or to make a proposal, feel free to visit my personal website at robert-pfeffer.net and to write into my guestbook!
Robert Pfeffer
