Lateef

Try Lateef

Weights and styles

• ExtraLight 200Lateef ExtraLight
• Light 300Lateef Light
• Regular 400Lateef Regular
• Medium 500Lateef Medium
• SemiBold 600Lateef SemiBold
• Bold 700Lateef Bold
• ExtraBold 800Lateef ExtraBold

About Lateef

Lateef is an Arabic-script typeface from SIL. The official notes describe it as an extended Arabic font whose style is meant to suit Sindhi and other South Asian languages, and explain that it takes its name from Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai, a Sindhi mystic and poet. The family has seven static weights: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold and ExtraBold. According to the same notes, six of them arrived with an update in July 2022. There are no italics, and Lateef is not a variable font. Each font holds 1,829 glyphs across the Arabic and Latin scripts. The Latin letters shown in the specimen are a bookish serif of moderate contrast, set small on the body; the license notice attributes them to the Crimson Pro project. Lateef is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Lateef works

Sindhi text

Sindhi is the language the official description names first as the purpose of the design.

Arabic-script documents with hierarchy

Weights from ExtraLight to ExtraBold let headings, text and captions come from one family.

Arabic-script text with English

Serif Latin letters are built in, so an English name or citation inside a line needs no second font.

Books and literary publishing

Light, Regular and Medium give a publisher three text colours to match paper and size.

Headings in ExtraBold

The 800 weight sets titles above text in the lighter weights.

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
• Estonian

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

Character sets found in the files: arabic, latin. 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 Lateef

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 Lateef 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: "Lateef";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Lateef-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Lateef";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Lateef-ExtraBold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 800;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Lateef";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Lateef-ExtraLight.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 200;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Lateef";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Lateef-Light.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
/* …and 3 more files in the package, declared the same way */

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Lateef 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=Lateef:wght@200;300;400;500;600;700;800&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Latin is basic

The Latin part covers Western European languages only; too few Latin Extended characters are present for that subset, and the Turkish ğ is not in the character map.

Static files

Lateef comes as seven separate files, one per weight, and has no variable version in the package.

No italics

All seven fonts are upright.

FAQs

Collections with Lateef

• Fonts that support Arabic

  Open-license families for the Arabic script with a matching Latin: Naskh text faces, Kufi-based sans-serifs and display designs.

Similar fonts

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