Gentium Book Plus

Try Gentium Book Plus

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Gentium Book Plus Regular Italic
• Bold 700Gentium Book Plus Bold Bold Italic

About Gentium Book Plus

Gentium Book Plus is a serif typeface for continuous reading, with calligraphic stress, angled head serifs and a moderate x-height. It succeeds Gentium Book Basic, which covered only a limited range of Latin; the Plus version keeps the same four styles and extends them to the complete Gentium Plus character set. Each file holds 4,244 glyphs spanning Latin and Latin Extended, Cyrillic and its extension, modern and ancient Greek, and Vietnamese. According to the release notes, hinting for Windows was improved considerably as well. Compared with Gentium Plus, the Book cut is a little heavier on the page. The family is static, not variable: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. SIL International publishes the fonts, and the font file names Victor Gaultney, Annie Olsen, Iska Routamaa and Becca Hirsbrunner as designers.

Where Gentium Book Plus works

Books and long-form text

A slightly darker regular weight holds up in print and on screen, and true italics and bold cover normal text emphasis.

Polytonic Greek and classics

The Greek Extended block is included, so ancient Greek with breathings and accents sets in the same face as the commentary.

Linguistics and dictionaries

With 4,244 glyphs, many accented and phonetic Latin letters are available without falling back to another font.

Multilingual documents

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese share one design, which keeps a report or textbook visually consistent across languages.

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
• Greek

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

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, greek-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 Gentium Book Plus

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

body {
  font-family: "Gentium Book Plus", serif;
}

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

Things to know

Two weights only

The family stops at Regular and Bold with their italics. There are no light, medium or black cuts.

Larger files

The wide character set makes each font file bigger than its Basic predecessor; subsetting keeps web delivery small.

Replaces Gentium Book Basic

The Basic family lacked Latin Extended, Cyrillic and Greek; Gentium Book Plus adds all three.

FAQs

Collections with Gentium Book Plus

• 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