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Once you’re happy that you know roughly how tall the letters of your Gothic alphabet should be, it’s best to start with the two simplest: ‘i’ and ‘l’.

In case you want to know, it’s pronounced ‘LIT-era tex-choo-WAH-lis kwod-RAH-tuh’. It will make your letters stiff and clumsy. The particular style of Gothic alphabet I’ve laid out here is a formal hand that would have been used for copying the main text (ie not translations or footnotes) of high-quality books in Latin between 1200 and 1500. (Even more prestigious was textualis prescissa or sine pedibus.). Tissues or cloth, and water if you like, for wiping ink off the nib, fingers, etc. You’ll use the same trick to form other Gothic letters later on.

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I’m going to assume you’ve made yourself comfortable :-). Yes, it really does take six separate pen-strokes to form this sort of Gothic letter ‘n’. The gothic text and font generator is a fun and extremely user-friendly tool. Then, underneath, in the bottom line of the illustration, you’ll see how the letter progresses as a whole when you add the different marks together. There are loads of illustrations of how to write a Gothic alphabet step by step in the lessons themselves.

On to the next Gothic letters: ‘n’ and ‘u’. Try to keep the letters regular: Okay. These are basically formed of two ‘i’s joined together and the join is … an exciting diagonal line!

Rule your top line accordingly, or just estimate and stick to it as well as you can. This is the second-highest grade of Gothic alphabet from the period. (The thin diagonal slash as a ‘dot’ above the ‘i’ is not always found in the medieval originals but is very useful indeed for making Gothic script more legible.).

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Archive of freely downloadable fonts. And, of course, this page in clear sight. If you do the whole tutorial thoroughly, there are at least a couple of hours’ fun to be had out of it. The wider your nib, the taller and larger your letters must be. This site uses cookies to keep track of some visitor activity and information, which cannot be used to identify you.