Abhaya Libre

Try Abhaya Libre

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Abhaya Libre Regular
• Medium 500Abhaya Libre Medium
• SemiBold 600Abhaya Libre SemiBold
• Bold 700Abhaya Libre Bold
• ExtraBold 800Abhaya Libre ExtraBold

About Abhaya Libre

Abhaya Libre is a serif typeface that pairs Sinhala letters with a matching Latin alphabet. The official notes describe it as a libre, Unicode-compliant version of an earlier Sinhala typeface designed in 1996, which in turn interpreted Sinhala letterpress type of the 1960s; for this release the letters were redrawn from scratch for web pages, tablets and small phone sizes. The Latin, credited to Sol Matas, shows strong contrast between thick and thin strokes, ball-shaped terminals and large counters with short ascenders and descenders. Mooniak, a small type foundry in Colombo, leads the project together with Pushpananda Ekanayake. The download contains five static files, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold and ExtraBold, with no italics and no variable file. Each font holds 920 glyphs across the Sinhala, Latin and Latin Extended subsets, and the notes mention stylistic sets for compact Da forms.

Where Abhaya Libre works

Sinhala books and newspapers

The Sinhala glyph set is described as covering Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit texts, with letters redrawn for small sizes.

Bilingual Sinhala and English layouts

The Latin alphabet was drawn to match the stroke contrast of the Sinhala, so mixed lines keep one texture.

Headlines and subheadings

SemiBold, Bold and ExtraBold files give titles a darker colour than the Regular used for text.

Web pages read on phones

Large counters and short ascenders and descenders were added, according to the notes, for viewing on screens.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Sinhala. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext, sinhala. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Abhaya Libre

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Abhaya Libre on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Abhaya Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/AbhayaLibre-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Abhaya Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/AbhayaLibre-ExtraBold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 800;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Abhaya Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/AbhayaLibre-Medium.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 500;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Abhaya Libre";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/AbhayaLibre-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 1 more files in the package, declared the same way */

body {
  font-family: "Abhaya Libre", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Abhaya Libre with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Abhaya+Libre:wght@400;500;600;700;800&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No italics

Abhaya Libre has upright files only. Emphasis within text has to use a heavier weight.

Five static files

The package holds Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold and ExtraBold as separate files. There is no variable font.

Name of the family

The official notes derive the name Abhaya from King Abhaya, who ruled from the ancient kingdom of Upatissa Nuwara in Sri Lanka.

FAQs

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts