David Libre
Monotype Imaging Inc., SIL International, Meir SadanSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Serif · 3 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free David alternatives
Ismar David, 1954, and with Frank Ruehl one of the two Hebrew types most Hebrew books have been set in.
Why people look for a David alternative
David is the standard Hebrew typeface for continuous text, drawn by Ismar David and bundled with operating systems rather than licensed for redistribution. Anyone setting Hebrew on a website that has to work without a system font needs something they can serve themselves, and the list of open Hebrew faces that read well at text size is short.
What a David substitute has to get right
Hebrew has no ascenders or descenders to work with, so the whole design lives in the width of the letters and the weight of their horizontal strokes. Get those wrong and the result is not merely ugly, it is unreadable — which is why the Hebrew has to be the design rather than an alphabet added to a Latin family.
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.
David and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Installed with Windows
- 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
David
| Property | David Libre |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 500, 700 |
| Variable | No |
| Italic | No |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Vietnamese, Hebrew |
| Glyphs | 851 |
| Web font | 33 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to David?
- David Libre — 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 David 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 David 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 David 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.