Kadwa
Designed By
Sol Matas
2 Styles Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Kadwa · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
2 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Kadwa ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Monsoon recipes from Pune
A Page In Kadwa
Kadwa · 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.
2 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Monsoon recipes from Pune
Bold700
Monsoon recipes from Pune
Kadwa began on a pixel grid. Sol Matas, a type designer in Berlin, drew a slab serif called Bitter for reading on screens, starting every letter as squares of pixels and only later smoothing the curves, and Kadwa is the Devanagari family she built from that same foundation.
So it inherits Bitter’s habits. Stroke weight barely varies, and the serifs are as thick as the strokes they sit on, ending in square terminals. The Regular is darker than a print face would be, which gives a paragraph a dense, even color on a screen. Matas also spaced the letters by hand so that the font needs very few kerning pairs, a choice made for web browsers that did not apply kerning at the time.
2 weights, 2 scripts. Regular and Bold, each with Devanagari and Latin in the same file, plus fractions, ordinals, superscripts and 1 stylistic set. Google added it in June 2015.
There is no italic. For a bilingual document in Hindi or Marathi with English beside it, use the Bold for emphasis and the Regular for short passages; we would keep it at 18 px or larger, where the heavy Regular reads as solid.

Characters & Figures
563 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Kadwa
2 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 173 KB ↓- Version
- 1.001
- 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/kadwa/kadwa.css">
body {
font-family: 'Kadwa', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Kadwa 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.
