Noto Serif

Try Noto Serif

Weights and styles

• Thin 100Noto Serif Thin Thin Italic
• ExtraLight 200Noto Serif ExtraLight ExtraLight Italic
• Light 300Noto Serif Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Noto Serif Regular Italic
• Medium 500Noto Serif Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Noto Serif SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Noto Serif Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Noto Serif ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic
• Black 900Noto Serif Black Black Italic

Noto Serif is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file per style, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Noto Serif

Noto Serif is a serif family with modulated strokes, meaning the vertical stems are thicker than the horizontals and joins. In the specimen the contrast is moderate, the serifs are solid and bracketed, and the lowercase is tall, a combination aimed at text rather than ornament. Noto Serif is the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek serif of the Noto collection and is meant to accompany the Noto Serif fonts made for other scripts. Two variable axes are provided: weight from 100 to 900 and width from 62.5 to 100. Nine named weights in roman and italic give 18 styles. The fonts contain 3,791 glyphs, including subsets for Latin Extended, Cyrillic Extended, Greek Extended and Vietnamese. Google is credited as designer, with the Monotype Design Team in the name table. It was added to Google Fonts in 2013.

Where Noto Serif works

Books and long documents

Moderate contrast and sturdy serifs hold up in pages of continuous text, with italics for titles and emphasis.

Articles in Russian or Greek

Cyrillic and Greek are drawn in the same style as the Latin, so translated editions keep one look.

Academic writing

Greek Extended and Cyrillic Extended subsets supply accented and less common letters that scholarly text calls for.

Headlines over serif text

Black 900 and the narrower width settings produce compact titles from the same family.

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 Noto Serif

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 Noto Serif 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: "Noto Serif";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/NotoSerif-Italic-VariableFont_wdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Noto Serif";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/NotoSerif-VariableFont_wdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Noto Serif", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Noto Serif 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=Noto+Serif:ital,wght@0,100..900;1,100..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Thin weights are very light

Thin 100 and ExtraLight 200 are fine-stroked in the specimen and are better kept for large sizes.

Width axis from 62.5 to 100

Letters can be narrowed but not expanded.

Other scripts live in sister families

Scripts outside Latin, Cyrillic and Greek have their own Noto Serif fonts.

FAQs

Collections with Noto Serif

• Serif fonts for long reading on screens

  Text serifs drawn for screens or for long reading: large x-heights, moderate contrast and real italics for articles, blogs and documentation.

• 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.

• Variable fonts with a width axis

  Variable families in which letter width is adjustable as well as weight, from slight narrowing for copy-fitting to a full condensed-to-wide range.

• Type systems with matching sans, serif and mono families

  Families designed to be used together: a sans, a serif or slab and often a monospace that share proportions, weights and character.

• Fonts that support Greek

  Open-license families with Greek glyphs beside Latin, for Greek-language sites and for mathematics, science and classics.

Similar fonts

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