Caudex

Try Caudex

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Caudex Regular Italic
• Bold 700Caudex Bold Bold Italic

About Caudex

Caudex is a serif typeface built around an unusually large character set for historical texts. According to the official notes it began in the late nineties as a font for printing old handwritten text, was later rebuilt as a Unicode font with FontForge, and includes most of the characters recommended by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) in version 3.0. Each font holds 2,017 glyphs, covering Latin, Latin Extended, Greek and the Runic script. In the specimen the letters are wide, with wedge-shaped, flaring serifs, a pen-like slope in the lowercase a, and a W whose inner strokes cross. The four styles are Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic as static files; Caudex is not a variable font. The official page names Nidud as designer, the copyright notice names Hjort Nidudsson, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Caudex works

Editions of medieval texts

Most MUFI 3.0 characters are present, so abbreviations and special letters of medieval manuscripts can be typed instead of drawn.

Transcriptions with runes

The Runic script is in the same font as the Latin letters, which keeps inscriptions and commentary in one typeface.

Classical studies with Greek quotations

Greek is included, so a Greek word can sit inside a Latin-script sentence without a font change.

History books and journals

Regular and Bold with italics cover text, titles of works and 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: Greek, Runic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: greek, latin, latin-ext, 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 Caudex

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

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

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

Things to know

Two weights

Caudex has Regular 400 and Bold 700 with italics. There are no lighter or intermediate weights.

Large files

The four TTF files hold 2,017 glyphs each and total about 1.9 MB; for the web, subsetting is worth considering.

Designer name is given in two forms

The official page lists Nidud, while the copyright notice reads Hjort Nidudsson. The font's own name table leaves the designer field empty.

FAQs

Collections with Caudex

• 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.

Similar fonts

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