Old London font
Every other result for the Old London font is a file to install, and installing something is not an option in most of the places people want it. Type a word below and copy and paste it in blackletter characters instead, which arrive intact wherever plain text does.
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Bold Fraktur
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
πΊππ π·πππππ
That is already styled text.
Readable blackletter
Unicode has no Old London, only fraktur, so these are the fraktur styles that hold a word together longest, each converting what you typed above. If plain reading matters more than the look, the plainer styles are on the homepage.
πΊππ π·πππππ
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
The complete one, and what the box above gives you. It is denser than Old London, with more decoration on the capitals, so it reads best kept to a name or a short title rather than a sentence.
πΊβπβπβ βπ·βπβπβπβπβπ
Can look wrong in 1 of 5 apps
Bold Fraktur with a space after each letter, the nearest this gets to the open fitting Old London is chosen for. A long name stops closing up, and in exchange it looks typed rather than lettered.
ππ©π‘ ππ¬π«π‘π¬π«
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
Thinner strokes leave more white inside each letter. The catch is five capitals, C, H, I, R and Z, which come from an older block of Unicode and land lighter than the rest, most visibly at the start of a name.
Most blackletter is designed to be admired one letter at a time. Pack six of those letters into a name and the word turns into a hedge: the counters, meaning the enclosed white shapes inside the letters, close up, and the eye loses where each letter starts. That is why so much of this lettering appears as a single large initial with ordinary type doing the actual work around it.
The Old London font gives some of that space back. Steffmann built it from Victorian British lettering instead of from a German fraktur, and that ancestry is the whole reason it behaves differently: signwriting of that period was cut for shop fascias and mastheads meant to be read across a street, so it holds the weight of blackletter while keeping the letters apart.
Which makes it the sensible pick for a two-word title, a band name or a heading somebody is meant to read rather than decode. If you want the densest and most illegible version of the look instead, that is the Cloister Black font, and it is the right choice for exactly one enormous capital.
Old London
Free to download, and its designer, Dieter Steffmann, said his fonts were free for commercial use as well. The doubt is over whether his revivals were his to give away on those terms, which leaves the question open rather than settled, and it is the same gap that keeps the file off this site.
Nothing sinister is going on. A designer put a lot of work into a face, gave it away for people to enjoy, and never wrote the licence a company's legal team would later want to read. The download sites then listed it under whatever heading suited them, and a label reading free on one of those pages describes the price and not the permissions.
So: a poster for your room, a gift, a personal project, nobody minds. A logo for a client, a run of merchandise, an app you are charging for, and the sensible move is a face whose terms are written down, which usually means an open-licence one. Everything the box above produces sidesteps this entirely, because Unicode characters have no owner and carry no licence at all.
The characters above are Bold Fraktur, the only blackletter alphabet Unicode has every letter of. It is denser than Old London and its capitals carry more decoration, so it trades away the very openness this face is worth having for. Nothing can be done about that: Unicode encodes a few generic styles rather than typefaces, and a more readable blackletter is not one of the options.
Two things it will not do. Digits do not convert, because Unicode holds no blackletter numerals whatsoever, so anything with a year in it needs a style that does convert digits standing in. And a word set in these characters cannot be restyled afterwards, since the shape is part of the character rather than something applied to it.
A print, a shirt or anything that gets enlarged wants none of this. Characters have one set of shapes and run out of resolution the moment you scale a screenshot of them, so export a real typeface as a PNG instead, drawn at three times screen size.
Questions
Not the face itself, no, and nothing else can either. A font is a file of shapes that has to be installed where the text is displayed, and copying text moves character codes without any shapes attached. The receiving app supplies those. What you can paste is the set of characters above, which carry their own blackletter shapes and therefore survive the trip.
Old London is one particular font, and Old English is a loose label for the whole blackletter category, so one sits inside the other. Confusingly, Old English is also the name of a real language spoken in England before about 1150, which is why a search for it returns both typefaces and Beowulf. Old London is unambiguous by comparison: it names exactly one file.
Old London, comfortably, and it is the main reason to choose it. Its counters are more open and its capitals rounder, so a whole word stays decipherable where Cloister Black closes up into a dense block. Set one enormous initial and Cloister Black looks better. Set a name, a heading or a two-word title and Old London is the one people can actually read.
Its designer said yes, but a remark he made is not a licence document you can show a client, and his revivals have had their right to be given away questioned. Anyone telling you it is definitely cleared is guessing. For a paid project, use an open-licence blackletter instead, where the permissions are published and you can show somebody the text.
Through the box at the top of this page rather than through the font file, which neither app will look at. Type your word, copy the converted line and paste it into the bio, the username or the message. Those are characters carrying their own blackletter shapes, so nothing has to be installed at either end, and the same line works in TikTok, X, WhatsApp and a Steam profile.
The file is distributed as a single regular cut, and no, it makes no difference to what you can paste. Unicode holds blackletter in two weights, a complete bold and a regular that borrows five capitals from elsewhere, so an Old London text generator has those two sets of shapes to reach for however many cuts the original family has. Choosing between them is a decision you only get to make once the font is installed on the machine doing the drawing.
Because you are seeing whichever blackletter the app you pasted into has on hand, applied to characters that only say what they are and not how to draw them. The same word can come out with heavier strokes on a phone than on a laptop. It is also why the text stays readable everywhere rather than turning into empty boxes, which is the trade the whole approach rests on.
Titles, mastheads, certificates, band names, tattoo lettering and anything wanting age without becoming unreadable. It suits longer strings better than most blackletter does, so a full name or a short phrase works where a denser face would need to be cut back to initials. For a screen field that accepts no fonts at all, the characters above are the version that gets there.