FancyText

Gothic text generator

Blackletter, fraktur, old English β€” three names for one family of heavy, broken-pen letters. Fourteen variants below, every one a real Unicode character.

Gothic font generator

0 characters

14 styles on this page

    Fraktur, blackletter, old English β€” same letters

    Strictly speaking, blackletter is the umbrella: the dense, angular writing used in European manuscripts from the twelfth century. Fraktur is one later branch of it, and β€œold English” is the name printers gave the style in England. Search volume treats all three as one thing, and so does this tool β€” the fourteen rows are the blackletter block of Unicode plus its common combinations with heavy weight.

    Light fraktur and bold fraktur

    The first row, π”‰π”―π”žπ”¨π”±π”²π”―, is the lighter cut. π•±π–—π–†π–π–™π–šπ–— is the bold one. Both are genuinely separate code points, not a weight setting, which is why they paste into places that have no formatting at all. On a name field, bold fraktur is usually the better read β€” the thin strokes of light fraktur disappear at 12 px on a phone.

    Why gothic breaks more than any other style

    Blackletter has the weakest font coverage of the styles on this site. The characters exist in Unicode, but a device only draws them if the installed font includes the block. Android builds before version 9 and a number of cheaper phones fall back to an empty rectangle. Test on the phone you actually post from before you commit a name to it.

    There is a second, quieter limit: not every letter has a blackletter form. Digits and most punctuation do not, so they stay plain while the letters change β€” which is why a gothic username with a number in it looks broken rather than styled.

    Gothic text for a tattoo

    The letters are text, not a font file. A tattoo artist cannot take a screenshot and print it at 300 dpi β€” you need the actual typeface. Ask them for a fraktur or old English font, set the wording in it, and approve the outline. Use this tool to decide the wording and to see the shape on screen, then let the artist do the lettering.

    Related pages

    Gothic text generator: questions

    Is gothic text the same as old English?

    In practice yes. Old English is the English printing name for blackletter, and fraktur is the German branch of the same family. Unicode stores them in one block, so every style on this page is both a gothic and an old English generator output.

    Why do some gothic letters show as boxes?

    The installed font has no glyph for the blackletter block. Coverage is weaker than for bold or cursive, especially on older Android devices and in some email clients. Fewer letters and no digits in the text reduces the chance of a miss.

    Can I use gothic text in an Instagram username?

    Instagram usernames only accept plain letters, digits, full stops and underscores, so styled characters are rejected there. The name field and the bio do accept them β€” the name field is 30 characters and the bio is 150.

    Can I get a tattoo in this font?

    Not from a screenshot. These are Unicode characters, not a typeface file, so the outline you see on screen is whatever font the device used. Take the wording to the artist and let them set it in a real blackletter font before the stencil.