Petrona

Try Petrona

Weights and styles

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

Petrona 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 Petrona

Petrona is a serif typeface built for text, with a tall lowercase, pronounced ascenders and curves that change little in thickness. The capitals carry heavy, asymmetric serifs and arms cut at reversed angles, details that give the face its own character without leaving the text genre. According to the official notes, Petrona began as a single roman style and was redrawn from scratch during 2019 and 2020 into a full family. Roman and italic are separate variable files, each with a weight axis from 100 to 900 and nine named weights from Thin to Black, 18 styles altogether. The notes list small caps, ligatures, alternates, several kinds of numerals and fractions, and say the earlier swash Q remains available in Stylistic Set 1. The 1,045 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese. Ringo R. Seeber leads the project, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Petrona works

Long articles and book text

A large x-height and low stroke contrast keep paragraphs even at reading sizes, in print and on screens.

Headlines from the same family

Thin 100 and Black 900 sit far enough from Regular to set a title without bringing in a second typeface.

Bylines, captions and running heads

The small caps and the choice of numeral styles handle the small typographic parts of a page.

Magazines with a consistent voice

Eighteen styles let features, sidebars and pull quotes differ in weight and slope while sharing one design.

Text in Vietnamese

The Vietnamese character set is included, with the stacked accents that the language requires.

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

Character sets found in the files: 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 Petrona

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 Petrona 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: "Petrona";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Petrona-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Petrona";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Petrona-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

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

Things to know

The swash Q is an option

The earlier Q with a swash tail is not the default. It is reached through Stylistic Set 1.

Two variable files

Roman and italic each hold the full 100 to 900 weight range. Static instances are available from the official source.

Latin scripts only

The 1,045 glyphs cover Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese. Cyrillic and Greek are not included.

FAQs

Collections with Petrona

• 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.

Similar fonts

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