Cardo

Try Cardo

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Cardo Regular Italic
• Bold 700Cardo Bold

About Cardo

Cardo is an old-style serif typeface drawn by David Perry for scholarly typesetting. The specimen shows moderate contrast between thick and thin strokes, bracketed serifs, slanted stress in the round letters and a modest x-height under long ascenders, the proportions of a book face. Its character set is what sets it apart: 3,831 glyphs, with subsets for Greek and extended Greek, Hebrew, Gothic, Old Italic and Runic next to Latin and extended Latin. The official description adds ligatures, old-style figures, real small capitals and assorted punctuation and spacing characters. The package holds three static files, Regular, Italic and Bold; there is no bold italic. Cardo was added to Google Fonts in 2011, and the copyright notice, dated 2002 to 2011, names David J. Perry. The fonts are published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Cardo works

Classical and Biblical texts

Greek, extended Greek and Hebrew subsets sit beside Latin in the same design, so a quoted passage does not force a change of typeface.

Medieval studies and linguistics

Gothic, Old Italic and Runic subsets cover historical scripts that general text families rarely carry.

Academic books and journals

Old-style figures and small capitals, listed in the official description, serve footnotes, abbreviations and running heads.

Essays and long articles

Moderate contrast and book proportions suit continuous reading; Italic marks titles and emphasis, Bold marks headings.

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
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Old Italic, Runic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: gothic, greek, greek-ext, hebrew, latin, latin-ext, old-italic, runic. 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 Cardo

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 Cardo 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: "Cardo";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Cardo-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Cardo";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Cardo-Italic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Cardo";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Cardo-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Cardo", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Cardo 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=Cardo:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No bold italic

The package has three files: Regular, Italic and Bold. Bold has no italic companion, so software may slant the Bold artificially.

Cyrillic and Vietnamese are absent

Despite the large glyph count, there is no Cyrillic or Vietnamese subset; the extra characters go to Greek, Hebrew and historical scripts.

Static files only

Cardo is not a variable font. Each of the three is a separate TTF file.

FAQs

Collections with Cardo

• Serif fonts for academic and scholarly writing

  Text families with very large character sets for theses, journals and critical editions: Greek, Cyrillic, phonetic and historical characters.

• Old-style and revival serif fonts for books

  Digital revivals of Renaissance, baroque and later book types, and new designs in the old-style tradition, most with italics, for novels, essays and fine printing.

• Fonts that cover several writing systems

  Families that set Latin together with three or more other scripts in one design, for multilingual sites, apps and documents.

Similar fonts

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