Gaelic abc

The Gaelic Schoolbook true type digital font, based on the traditional handwriting taught to Irish schoolchildren pre 1963 was developed thru’ 2007/2008, Project Manager  SM Publications. The project was grant aided in it’s early stages by Foras na Gaeilge whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged. It began with the penmanship of Liam O’ Connor, Calligrapher to The Incorporated Law Society, Dublin.

The expanded Gaelic alphabet drawn was then digitised  by Angel Luis Gonzalez, a Graphic artist living in Dublin, thanks to whose recent help this site has finally been upgraded.

Following the work in Dublin both by Angel Luis Gonzalez and Jonathan Davies, the font was modified and remade by Prof. Edward Detyna at The Electronic Font Foundry. We believe it now to be screen compatible at all fontsizes in its four versions, Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic. It comprises 415 characters, the entire Western European character set and can now be used in all major European languages.

When Gaelic Translation software comes on stream, this font will freely interchange between all European languages. The Gaelic language of Ireland pre 1963 included 9 uppercase, 9 lowercase dotted consonants, both r longleg and s shortleg, s dot, dotless i and tironian et & instead of ampersand. All are present here. This font has & as default and ampersand as a special character to insert, placed in the Unicode position 204A ie. where the Tironian-et looking like the number 7 should be. Where dotted consonant Gaelic is machine readable, this font is freely interchangeable between both forms of Irish Gaelic, Click on Images, wait for detail.