Firstly, I owe Ultramind Dragon an apology; I am vastly overdue in posting news about this!

Because, you see, what Ultramind has created is an applet — Ultramind Dragon’s Runic Font Converter — hosted here at the Codex, which will convert English text to Britannian Runic, using a variety of different font sets.

Here’s how it works:

This tool is designed to facilitate the generation of text using runes found in the Ultima games. Unfortunately, most/all Unicode runes are not usually rendered by fonts that approximate Ultima runes very well, and some aren’t even close. Therefore special fonts are required. What’s more, the runes that appear in the hard material released with the games tend to differ from those used in-game! As this project develops, (some of) these fonts will be made available.

Input

All of your text should be ASCII, although it will safely pass Unicode characters through. This tool does not collate Latin letters, so anything that isn’t 7-bit ASCII won’t be translated.

Runes in Unicode

Ultima runes are largely gleaned from J.R.R. Tolkien’s works (“cirth”). Those are based on ancient Germanic runes (“futhark”). Currently, there is a petition to include Tolkien’s runes in Unicode, but no one is even considering including Ultima runes in Unicode… yet. Consequently, the Germanic runes used by this tool will look very different from what is seen in Ultima games when using general fonts and other code points won’t even look like runes.

You can check out the font converter at the link above, whereat you’ll also find the source code for the applet. Feel free to give it a try, and to build upon it if you are so inclined!