Source Serif 4

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Frank Grießhammer

Foundry

Adobe

Released

2014

Category

Serif

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Body text, Documentation, Editorial, Captions

Weights

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

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

1,463

Languages

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

Download size

989 KB

Source

github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif

Questions

Is Source Serif 4 free for commercial use?

Yes. Source Serif 4 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 Source Serif 4 in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Source Serif 4 belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Frank Grießhammer. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install Source Serif 4?

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. Source Serif 4 is a variable font: those files carry all 8 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Source Serif 4 that is the regular weight. If that happens, use the Static download on this page instead: it has 64 ordinary files, one per weight, and works everywhere.

Does Source Serif 4 support Turkish?

Yes. Source Serif 4 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 Source Serif 4 support?

Source Serif 4 covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek and Vietnamese, across 1,463 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

Does Source Serif 4 support Cyrillic?

Yes. Source Serif 4 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 Source Serif 4 come in?

Source Serif 4 comes in 8 weights: Extra Light (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600), Bold (700), Extra Bold (800) and Black (900). 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 Source Serif 4?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 201 KB against 338 KB for the complete file, 40% 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 Source Serif 4 as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is source-serif-4.woff2, and it is about 338 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.