Caladea
Carolina Giovagnoli, Andrés TorresiSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Serif · 2 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Cambria alternatives
Jelle Bosma for Microsoft, 2004, and the serif that ships beside Calibri in Office.
Why people look for a Cambria alternative
Cambria ships with Microsoft Office and was drawn to hold up in print and on screen at small sizes. Like everything in that bundle it cannot be embedded or self-hosted, which is where the trouble starts: a report, a template or a proposal set in it stops looking like itself the moment it leaves the machine it was made on.
What a Cambria substitute has to get right
Metric-compatible widths first, for the same document-reflow reason as Calibri, and a sturdy low-contrast serif that does not thin out at small sizes.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Cambria and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Installed with Windows and Microsoft Office
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Not permitted by its licence
- On a website
- Only as a system font, on machines that already have it
Cambria
| Property | Caladea |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 700 |
| Variable | No |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Latin only |
| Glyphs | 464 |
| Web font | 25 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Cambria?
- Caladea — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Cambria alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Cambria alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Cambria substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.