Cardo
Designed By
David Perry
3 Styles Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Cardo · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
3 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Cardo ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Codex fragment, second hand, folio 12
A Page In Cardo
Cardo · 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.
3 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Codex fragment, second hand, folio 12
Italic400
Codex fragment, second hand, folio 12
Bold700
Codex fragment, second hand, folio 12
Runic, Gothic, Old Italic and Hebrew all sit in Cardo beside its Latin and Greek, in a Regular that holds 3,830 characters. Few serif families go that far, and the reason is the audience. David Perry made it for classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists and linguists, people whose footnotes quote a manuscript in 1 alphabet and a commentary in another.
He worked on it between 2002 and 2011. Perry describes it as a font for scholarly use in classical and medieval languages, built to follow version 3.0 of the MUFI specification for medieval characters.
There is also the plainer typography a book needs: true small capitals, old style figures, standard and discretionary ligatures, superscripts and subscripts, and 14 stylistic sets on top. Perry intended it for ordinary typesetting as well, wherever an Old Style face suits the page.
Would we use it for a company annual report? No. For a critical edition with a Greek apparatus, or a thesis on Norse inscriptions, it is the free face we would reach for first. The family is Regular, Italic and Bold, with no bold italic.
Characters & Figures
3,830 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Cardo
3 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 550 KB ↓- Version
- 1.0451
- 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/cardo/cardo.css">
body {
font-family: 'Cardo', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Cardo 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.