Font name: Vulcanius…
…to honor Bonaventura Vulcanius, the XVI century first editor of the Codex Argenteus, which is the most extensive manuscript containing portions of the Gothic Bible. The Bible was translated into Gothic language in the mid IV century by Wulfila, the first bishop of the Goths.
Sample
Font version: 1.04
It is a final candidate version; updated on 20 October 2004.
Platform: Mac OS X and Windows
The font is in ".ttf" format, so it can be used both on Mac OS X (no Classic version, sorry) and Windows systems.
As an experiment, it contains also additional glyph features in AAT format (work on Mac OS X 10.3 and above); the corresponding OpenType features for Windows are untested.
Installing: MacOS X
In MacOS X, in order to use the font, double click on the file and then press the "Install" button in the font info window.
You could also install it manually, puting the font file in one of the following directories:
/Library/Fonts
~/Library/Fonts
Installing: Windows
Covering the Plane 1 range of the Unicode 4 it may require at least Windows 2000 or XP to be usable. If you have trouble displaying Plane 1 characters on a Windows system add the following setting to your registry (you can do it with RegEdit):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\LanguagePack
SURROGATE=(REG_DWORD)0x00000002
This setting enables Windows 2000 and later to use the internal Uniscribe module to display supplementary characters.
Instead, on MacOS X you need not to hack anything to use a Plane 1 Unicode font. :-)
Style: Times-like
The aim was to reproduce the gothic script with the glyph shape of the Times New Roman capitals.
Comments
Vulcanius is a Unicode 4.0 compliant font covering the Gothic script. The font has been tested on MacOS X (10.3 - 10.4), and on Windows XP. The font includes all the gothic letters plus two glyph variants: one for the letter Sauil (S) and one for the letter Eis (I). The glyph variants work on cocoa application on MacOS X 10.3 and above. Glyph variants in OpenType flavour, that would be usable on Windows systems, have been added but are still untested.
Distribution
The font can be downloaded freely. Remember that it is still a work-in-progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
If you prefer, you could pay money for a very similar product by XenoTypeTech.com available here ;-)