Castoro

Try Castoro

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Castoro Regular Italic

About Castoro

Castoro is a robust serif for continuous reading. In the specimen the stroke contrast is moderate, the serifs are bracketed and firm, and the lowercase has the compact, slightly dark look of old book faces. The official notes explain that it began as a blend of features from Dutch types of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and was first made to accompany the Indic typefaces Tiro supplied to Harvard University Press. The released version keeps a large set of diacritics for transliterating South Asian languages and adds characters for more European languages. Its name comes from the North American beaver. The family has one weight in two styles, Regular and Italic, as separate static files, with 903 glyphs covering Latin and Latin Extended. John Hudson designed the roman; Paul Hanslow and Kaja Słojewska worked on the italic. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Castoro works

Books and long essays

Moderate contrast and firm bracketed serifs produce an even page of text, with a true italic for titles and emphasis.

Scholarly text with transliteration

The diacritic set for South Asian languages lets romanised names and terms be set without borrowing accents from another font.

Latin beside Indic scripts

Castoro was first drawn as the Latin companion for Tiro's Indic fonts, so it sits naturally next to them.

Pull quotes and standfirsts

The Italic at a larger size gives quotations a different texture from the Regular text around them.

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

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext. 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 Castoro

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

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

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

Things to know

No bold

Castoro has a single weight. Emphasis comes from the Italic, not from a heavier style.

903 glyphs for a Latin-only font

The glyph count includes the transliteration diacritics; the script coverage is Latin and Latin Extended, with no Cyrillic or Greek.

Two static files

Regular and Italic are separate TTF files. Castoro is not a variable font.

FAQs

Collections with Castoro

• 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.

Similar fonts

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