Open Sans

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Steve Matteson

Released

2011

Category

Sans-serif

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Body text, User interfaces, Documents, Long-form reading

Weights

300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

1,150

Languages

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

Download size

732 KB

Source

github.com/googlefonts/opensans

Questions

Is Open Sans free for commercial use?

Yes. Open Sans 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 Open Sans in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Open Sans 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 Open Sans?

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. Open Sans is a variable font: those files carry all 6 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Open Sans that is the regular weight. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 36 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.

Does Open Sans support Turkish?

Yes. Open Sans 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 Open Sans support?

Open Sans covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Vietnamese and Hebrew, across 1,150 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

Does Open Sans support Cyrillic?

Yes. Open Sans 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 Open Sans come in?

Open Sans comes in 6 weights: Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600), Bold (700) and Extra Bold (800). 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 Open Sans?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 134 KB against 307 KB for the complete file, 56% 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 Open Sans as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is open-sans.woff2, and it is about 307 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.