Why it exists
Most blackletter converters hand back a line of characters and stop there. Paste that line into a username field and some letters may vanish; type a year and the digits come out plain, because Unicode never encoded a single fraktur numeral. Neither problem shows up until the text is already somewhere public.
This site was built to answer the questions those tools leave out: which apps keep the letters, which characters are borrowed from another block, and what to do when what you actually need is a real font rather than something to paste.
What it does
- Converts your text into 20 Unicode styles at once, and decodes any of them back to plain letters.
- Shows how each style survives in the apps people paste into, checked in those apps rather than assumed from the character tables.
- Sets your words in real open-licence blackletter typefaces and saves them as an image, for anything printed, engraved or inked.
- Keeps charts of every letter A to Z and of what numbers can and cannot do, one character at a time.
What it will not do
- Offer font downloads. Where a named typeface is not free to share, its page explains the licence instead of handing over a file.
- Pass off a stand-in as the real thing. When a page shows a substitute for a commercial face, it says so beside the specimen.
- Collect your text. Conversion runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere. The privacy policy lists the little the site keeps.
How the facts are checked
Claims about Unicode are checked against the standard itself, and the gaps in it are tested by the site's own code, so a borrowed letter cannot go missing from a chart without a test failing. Claims about typefaces come from the foundry or from Microsoft's own font list. Claims about apps come from pasting into them.
It is an independent site, not affiliated with any font foundry, with Microsoft or with Monotype. Spotted a mistake? Tell us and it will be corrected.