Roboto

Try Roboto

Weights and styles

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

Roboto 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 Roboto

Roboto is a sans serif family that the official notes characterise as two-sided: a mechanical, largely geometric skeleton combined with friendly, open curves. Letters keep their natural widths instead of being forced into a rigid rhythm, which the notes link to the reading rhythm of humanist and serif type. In the specimen the strokes are even, the a is two-storey and the capital R stands on a straight diagonal leg. Since July 2020 Roboto has been a variable font with two axes: weight from 100 to 900 and width from 75 to 100, the narrow end matching the earlier Roboto Condensed. Nine named weights come in roman and italic, 18 styles in total. Its 1,326 glyphs cover Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese sets. The credits name Christian Robertson, ParaType and Font Bureau, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Roboto works

App and web interfaces

Nine weights with italics cover every level of an interface, from Thin display numerals to Bold buttons.

Dense tables and side panels

The width axis narrows to 75, fitting more characters into a column while staying in the same family.

Body text

Letters keep their natural widths, which the official notes credit for a more natural reading rhythm in paragraphs.

Products in several scripts

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese sets let one family serve many language versions.

Systems that need slab and mono companions

The official notes list Roboto Slab and Roboto Mono as members of the same superfamily, for headings and code.

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, 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 Roboto

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

body {
  font-family: "Roboto", sans-serif;
}

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

Things to know

Width axis is 75 to 100

It narrows the design toward the earlier Roboto Condensed; it does not make it wider.

Two variable files

Roman and italic are separate files, each with both axes.

FAQs

Collections with Roboto

• Clean sans-serif fonts for app interfaces

  Open-license sans-serif families that stay clear in buttons, menus, tables and settings screens, with the weights an interface needs.

• Fonts for subtitles and video captions

  Plain, sturdy sans-serif families for subtitles and captions, chosen for clear letters at small sizes and, in most cases, wide language coverage.

• 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 sans serif fonts