Abhaya Libre
Designed By
Mooniak
5 Styles Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Abhaya Libre · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
5 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Abhaya Libre ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Monsoon rain on the veranda
A Page In Abhaya Libre
Abhaya Libre · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.
A heading marks the next chapter. The margins leave room for a note while the text continues across the page.
5 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Monsoon rain on the veranda
Medium500
Monsoon rain on the veranda
Semi Bold600
Monsoon rain on the veranda
Bold700
Monsoon rain on the veranda
Extra Bold800
Monsoon rain on the veranda
Sri Lanka’s most widely used Sinhala typeface, FM Abhaya, was drawn by Pushpananda Ekanayake in 1996 as his reading of the letterpress Sinhala of the 1960s. Abhaya Libre is the free version, and a complete one. Mooniak, a small foundry in Colombo, redrew it from scratch with Ekanayake, made it Unicode compliant and tuned it for the web, tablets and the small screens of phones. Google Fonts paid for the first development and release in 2015, and it joined the library in August 2016.
The name goes back some 2,500 years, to King Abhaya, who ruled from the ancient kingdom of Upatissa Nuwara between 474 and 454 BCE.
Sol Matas drew the Latin to match. It borrows the strong thick-to-thin contrast of the Sinhala and lines it up with the logic of a Didone, some terminals keeping a trace of Sinhala form, and for screens the counters are large and the ascenders and descenders short. That Latin runs small for its size; set it a step larger than your usual serif.
5 weights, Regular to Extra Bold. Mooniak’s idea is the lighter weights for text and the heavier ones for headings. There is no italic, so book titles in a bibliography need another way to stand apart.
Beyond Sinhala the fonts handle Pali and Sanskrit, and a stylistic set turns on compact forms of the letter Da.
Characters & Figures
416 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Abhaya Libre
5 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 811 KB ↓- Version
- 1.050
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/abhaya-libre-2/abhaya-libre-2.css">
body {
font-family: 'Abhaya Libre', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Abhaya Libre Heading · Inter Body
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.