Solitreo
Designed By
Nathan Gross, Bryan Kirschen
1 Style Handwriting
A little note,
before you go.
Solitreo · Regular
Try a short note, a name or a line of your own to compare the strokes and spacing.
1 style available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Solitreo ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Found in grandmother's attic
A Note On The Page
Solitreo · Regular
A short letter, set in the family.
Thursday afternoon
Dear Alex,
I left the book by the window. There is a note on page twenty-three that I thought you would like. Bring it along on Thursday; we can finish the conversation over coffee.
See you there.
1 Style,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Found in grandmother's attic
Somewhere in a basement there is a ledger, or a bundle of letters, or the minutes of a community meeting, written in a hand most people would take for Hebrew. It is Spanish. More exactly it is Judeo-Spanish, the Spanish carried by the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 to Turkey and the Balkans, then Ottoman lands, and written in Solitreo, the cursive the Sephardim used for everything from diaries to accounts.
The script is a cursive form of the Rashi alphabet and has little in common with the Ashkenazi cursive used for Hebrew today, which is why those documents stay unreadable to the untrained eye. Its name comes from a Galician or Portuguese word meaning “to spell”; many Sephardim knew it only as ganchos, hooks, for the ligatures that link the letters. Writers of the language moved over to Roman letters, and Solitreo became close to extinct, an alphabet for a language that is itself endangered.
Bryan Kirschen started the Documenting Judeo-Spanish Project in 2019, remembering how few resources he had found when he first wanted to learn the script, and the project produced this font with Nathan Gross. Anyone transcribing a family archive or building a lesson can now type Solitreo directly.
1 style. The Latin and most other non-Hebrew characters were forked from Kalam.
Characters & Figures
453 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Solitreo
1 TTF style with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 52 KB ↓- Version
- 1.100
- 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/solitreo/solitreo.css">
body {
font-family: 'Solitreo', cursive;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Solitreo Heading · Inter Body
Thursday, Half Past Four
I left the book by the window. There is a note on page twenty-three that I thought you would like. Bring it along on Thursday; we can finish the conversation over coffee.