Cairo

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Mohamed Gaber, Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino

Released

2015

Category

Sans-serif

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Arabic text, User interfaces, Headlines, Signage

Weights

200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000

Styles

Normal

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

1,956

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Arabic

Download size

282 KB

Source

github.com/Gue3bara/Cairo

Questions

Is Cairo free for commercial use?

Yes. Cairo 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 Cairo in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Cairo belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Mohamed Gaber, Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install Cairo?

Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 1 font file 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. Cairo is a variable font: the single file carries all 9 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Cairo 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 Cairo support Turkish?

Yes. Cairo 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 Cairo support?

Cairo covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish and Arabic, across 1,956 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

What weights does Cairo come in?

Cairo comes in 9 weights: Extra Light (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600), Bold (700), Extra Bold (800), Black (900) and Extra Black (1000). 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 Cairo?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 75 KB against 173 KB for the complete file, 57% 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 Cairo as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is cairo.woff2, and it is about 173 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.