Mansalva

Try Mansalva

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Mansalva Regular

About Mansalva

Mansalva is a handwriting typeface drawn with the stroke of a soft marker: lines thicken and thin unevenly, ends are blunt, and letters tilt in slightly different directions. Capitals are large and loose while the lowercase is small and compact, which gives words a lively, uneven outline. What sets the font apart is its alternates. The official description says every letter and number comes with two alternate forms, so repeated characters need not look identical, and this accounts for much of the 875-glyph total in a family that has a single Regular font. Coverage reaches Latin, Latin Extended, Vietnamese and Greek. According to the same notes, an upgrade in October 2022 widened the Latin set and harmonised the vertical metrics. Mansalva is not a variable font. Carolina Short designed it, and it is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Mansalva works

Annotations on images and slides

A marker-like line reads as a note added by hand to a screenshot, diagram or presentation slide.

Sticky notes and reminders

The official description recommends the face for notes and informal passages, and it stays legible in a few short lines.

Quotes for social posts

Alternate letterforms keep doubled letters from repeating exactly, so a short quote looks written rather than typed.

Callouts on packaging

Blunt, heavy strokes make a few handwritten words stand out beside a printed product name.

Informal text in Greek or Vietnamese

Greek letters and Vietnamese diacritics are drawn in the same marker hand.

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
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Greek. 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, 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 Mansalva

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 Mansalva 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: "Mansalva";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Mansalva-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Mansalva", cursive;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Mansalva 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=Mansalva&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

One style

Mansalva has Regular 400 only, with no bold or italic.

Alternates depend on the software

The two alternate forms per character are stored in the font; applications without OpenType feature support show only the default shapes.

Line spacing changed in 2022

The official notes warn that the harmonised vertical metrics can visibly increase line spacing in existing web pages and documents on Mac.

Greek but not Cyrillic

Greek is included next to Latin and Vietnamese. Cyrillic is not.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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