Gothic Font Generator

Gothic, blackletter, Old English, fraktur

They're names for the same family of letter shapes: the dense, angular writing of medieval European manuscripts and early printing. Unicode calls its version Fraktur, after the blackletter style used in German printing for centuries. “Old English” is a popular name for blackletter typefaces; it has nothing to do with the Old English language.

Five letters from an older block

In the lighter Gothic style, C → ℭ, H → ℌ, I → ℑ, R → ℜ, Z → ℨ are Unicode's “black-letter” capitals from the Letterlike Symbols block (Unicode 1.1 (1993)). They were encoded before the mathematical fraktur letters (Unicode 3.1 (2001)), so Unicode reuses them. Gothic Bold doesn't need any substitutes.

Readability

Blackletter is hard to read at small sizes, even in print. It works best for a single word or a short name.

Before you paste

It's different text, not just a different look. To a computer, 𝒽ℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ is not the word hello. Keep the words people search for (your name, your shop, your username) in plain letters.

Screen readers may stumble. They can announce each styled letter by its Unicode name (“mathematical bold capital H”) or skip it, which makes the text hard to follow for people who rely on them. Use styles for a few words, not for whole paragraphs.

It can count double. Many styled letters (all the cursive, bold, italic and gothic ones) live outside the first 65,536 Unicode characters, so they take two UTF-16 code units. Web forms that limit length with the HTML maxlength attribute count those units, and X counts these letters as two characters each toward its 280-character limit.