Arimo

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Specification

Designer

Steve Matteson

Released

2010

Category

Sans-serif

Alternative to

Arial

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Documents, Body text, User interfaces, Presentations

Weights

400, 500, 600, 700

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

3,301

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese, Hebrew

Download size

638 KB

Source

github.com/googlefonts/arimo

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 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Arimo that is the regular weight. 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 Türkçe 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.

What languages does Arimo support?

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.

Does Arimo support Cyrillic?

Yes. Arimo includes the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Cyrillic Extended set as well, which adds the letters for languages beyond Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian. This was read from the font file itself. The complete WOFF2 and the zip both carry it; only the Latin-only web file leaves it out.

What weights does Arimo come in?

Arimo comes in 4 weights: Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600) and Bold (700). It is a variable font, so every one of them is in a single file and you can also set any weight in between.

Is there a smaller, Latin-only version of Arimo?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 68 KB against 250 KB for the complete file, 73% smaller, with every weight the family has still in it. It covers Latin and Latin Extended, which is everything a page in English, Turkish or a western European language sets — Türkçe included, since ı, İ, ğ and ş all live in that range. Take the complete file instead if you set Cyrillic, Greek or any alphabet outside Latin.

Where can I download Arimo as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is arimo.woff2, and it is about 250 KB. It is the complete font repacked for the web rather than a cut-down copy: the same glyphs, the same spacing and the same hinting as the .ttf in the download, roughly 60% smaller. Every browser still receiving updates reads WOFF2, so it is the only web format most sites need. Google Fonts does not offer this file for download at all — it serves WOFF2 from its own servers and gives you .ttf if you ask for the family.

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.