Charis SIL

Try Charis SIL

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Charis SIL Regular Italic
• Bold 700Charis SIL Bold Bold Italic

About Charis SIL

Charis SIL is a serif family whose purpose is breadth of language coverage. The project aims to provide a font for every current language and writing system that uses the Latin or Cyrillic script, and each font holds 3,549 glyphs: letters, a wide range of diacritics and many symbols used in linguistics and literacy work. Smart font routines place diacritics automatically, so a base letter can take marks in combinations that were never drawn as single characters. The specimen shows a sturdy design with low contrast, a large lowercase and solid bracketed serifs. The four styles are Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic; Charis SIL is not a variable font. SIL International is the designer of record, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Charis SIL works

Dictionaries and grammars

Phonetic and linguistic symbols sit in the same font as the text, so transcriptions match the surrounding words.

Publishing in languages with rare diacritics

Automatic mark positioning handles stacked and unusual accents that many fonts lack.

Literacy and school materials

Sturdy, low-contrast letters with a large lowercase keep primers and readers clear at text sizes.

Books that mix Latin and Cyrillic

Both scripts share one design in Regular, Bold and their italics.

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
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian

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

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. 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 Charis SIL

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

body {
  font-family: "Charis SIL", serif;
}

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

Things to know

Two weights

Charis SIL has Regular 400 and Bold 700 with italics; lighter or intermediate weights are not in this family.

Large files

Each of the four TTF files carries 3,549 glyphs, and together they take about 3 MB.

Reserved Font Names

The copyright notice reserves the names Charis and SIL, so a modified version must be released under a different name unless permission is given.

FAQs

Collections with Charis SIL

• 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