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, the Skeirs font is offered in two varieties: In “Skeirs Majuskel” the Gothic Range is mapped with uppercase letters whilst there are no lowercase letters. In “Skeirs Minuskel” it is mapped with minuscules while the majuscules have been moved to the private use area.

In historic Gothic there are only capital Letters. 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. Further aid gave me 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 Minuskel contains 200 characters and an attached system o Read more ... f 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 the beginning of a word 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.

As these typefaces are especially intended for screen use in internet browsers, the Latin range is – contrary to the other fonts – not mapped with Gothic letters, because on some systems this might cause display problems.