Arimo
A free alternative to Arial
Arimo occupies exactly the same horizontal space as Arial, character for character, so a document formatted in Arial opens on a machine that has never had Arial installed and the line breaks do not move. Steve Matteson drew it for Chrome OS to solve that specific problem, and it is a design in its own right rather than a traced copy — the letterforms are its own, only the widths are borrowed. If you are matching a layout rather than a look, this is the file you want.
Alphabets
- Latin
- Latin Extendedaccented characters for most European languages
- Turkishincluding ı, İ, ğ, ş and the rest
- Cyrillic
- Cyrillic Extended
- Greek
- Greek Extended
- Vietnamesethe full set of stacked accents
- Hebrew
Weight — 400
Specification
- Designer
- Foundry
- Released
- Category
- Alternative to
- License
- Commercial use
- Good for
- Weights
- Styles
- Variable
- Glyphs
- Languages
- Download size
- Source
Size ladder
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Characters
Uppercase
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
Lowercase
- a
- b
- c
- d
- e
- f
- g
- h
- i
- j
- k
- l
- m
- n
- o
- p
- q
- r
- s
- t
- u
- v
- w
- x
- y
- z
Numerals
- 0
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
Punctuation & symbols
- .
- ,
- :
- ;
- !
- ?
- '
- "
- ‘
- ’
- “
- ”
- (
- )
- [
- ]
- {
- }
- /
- \
- |
- -
- –
- —
- _
- @
- #
- $
- %
- &
- *
- +
- =
- <
- >
- ~
- ^
- `
- €
- £
- ¥
- ©
- ®
- °
- §
- †
- •
- …
Use it on the web
@font-face {
font-family: 'Arimo';
/* The download contains .ttf files. Put yours wherever you serve static
files from and point this at it. Converting to .woff2 first cuts the
size by roughly 60% and every current browser supports it. */
src: url('/fonts/arimo.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 400 700;
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
}
body {
font-family: 'Arimo', sans-serif;
}License
OFL-1.1
You may use, modify and redistribute this font, including in commercial work. You may not sell the font file on its own, and any modified version must be released under the same license and under a different name.
Commercial use allowed
Questions
- Is Arimo free for commercial use?
- Yes. Arimo is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement. You can use it in client work, in products you sell, on the web and in print. The one thing you may not do is sell the font file on its own. The licence is inside the download.
- Can I use Arimo in a logo?
- Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Arimo belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Steve Matteson. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.
- How do I install Arimo?
- Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 2 font files inside and open them, then press Install Font. On Windows, select them, right-click and choose Install. Restart any application that was already open before it will show up. Arimo is a variable font: those files carry all 4 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — only reads the first weight and will show it as Regular. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 8 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.
- Does Arimo support Turkish?
- Yes. Arimo includes the characters Turkish needs that plain Latin does not — the dotless ı, the dotted İ, and ğ, ş, ü, ö and ç in both cases. This was checked against the font file itself, not assumed from the fact that it covers Latin.
- Does Arimo support Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese and Hebrew?
- Yes. Arimo covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese and Hebrew, across 3,301 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.
- Can I use Arimo instead of Arial without my layout moving?
- Yes, and that is the whole reason it exists. Arimo is metrically compatible with Arial: every character is the same width as its Arial counterpart, so the same words break at the same points and a document keeps its page count. Swap the font in a Word file, a slide deck or a stylesheet and nothing reflows. What does change is the drawing — Arimo is its own design, so look closely at a headline and you will see differences in the letterforms even though the spacing is identical.