One name, several families
Blackletter is a group of medieval-looking writing styles and typefaces with tall, narrow, dark letters made of strokes that look cut rather than curved. People also call it gothic script, and in English it is sometimes called Old English lettering. It began as a handwriting style in medieval Europe and was later turned into metal type.
The families differ in small details, but they share the same dense, woven look. The word Textura even comes from the Latin verb for weaving.
The four names you will meet
Textura, also called Textualis, is the most calligraphic form. Its short vertical strokes, called minims, are treated with great care, and the way they begin and end is used to sort Textura into grades. Rotunda is the rounder grade of the same family.
Schwabacher is a rounded blackletter that dominated early German printing, roughly from 1480 to 1530. Its lowercase o is rounded on both sides. Fraktur followed and became the usual German blackletter by the middle of the sixteenth century. Its lowercase o has an angular left side and a rounded right side, which is a handy way to tell it apart from Schwabacher.
- Textura: tall, narrow and the most woven-looking.
- Rotunda: a rounder grade of Textura.
- Schwabacher: rounded forms, closer to handwriting.
- Fraktur: crisp, with a broken bowl on lowercase o.
The Gutenberg Bible
Johannes Gutenberg printed his famous Bible in Mainz in the 1450s, and the usual date given is about 1455. For it he cut a Textura typeface with many ligatures and abbreviations, so the page would look like the work of a skilled scribe. Most pages have 42 lines, which is why it is also called the 42-line Bible.
Because that book is so well known, many people link blackletter with churches, scholars and the Middle Ages, even though most blackletter typefaces were designed later.
Where you still see it
Several newspapers still set their names in blackletter. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Sydney Morning Herald are examples, and the style gives a serious, traditional feel. Heavy metal is another well-known home for it: researchers who study album art note that blackletter logos are common in the genre and tie that to associations with tradition, religion and history.
Designers also reach for it on certificates, invitations, signs and lettering projects, wherever someone wants an old-world look. Whatever the use, the letters are tall and dense, so they work best at larger sizes and with plenty of space around them.
A complication comes from twentieth-century German history. Fraktur was the everyday German typeface for centuries, and on 3 January 1941 a circular from the Nazi Party administration ended its official use in favor of Antiqua. Fraktur returned in limited use after 1945. We mention it only because the topic comes up when people choose gothic lettering.
Using it with this site
The gothic text generator on this site makes Unicode Fraktur and bold Fraktur you can copy and paste. The large preview is drawn with a real blackletter font, which is closer to how printed blackletter looks than the pasted characters are. Use the preview for PNG downloads and printing.
Sources and further reading
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