FAQ

Katagami is free. It is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. You can use it in any product, commercial or not, embed it in apps, documents and websites, and change it.

Keep the license with the font files when you share them, and give a changed version a new name. The license does not allow selling the fonts on their own.

Katagami Sans is for interfaces and display. It has squared bowls, level cuts and square punctuation. Katagami Round squares its bowls less and rounds every corner, so interfaces read softer.

Katagami Text is for long reading, with a lower x-height and tighter spacing. Katagami Serif is Text with rectangular serifs. Katagami Mono is for code, terminals and tables.

All five share one skeleton, so they mix on one page.

Link the stylesheet, then set the family in your CSS. The fonts are served from this site with open CORS, and each script has its own file, so a page loads only what it shows.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://katagami.kevinliu.studio/fonts/katagami.css">

body { font-family: "Katagami Sans", system-ui, sans-serif; }

To host the files yourself, take the fonts from the download page.

Use font-feature-settings with the feature's tag, or the matching font-variant property where CSS has one.

.price { font-feature-settings: "tnum"; }
.legal { font-variant-caps: small-caps; }

The features page shows each feature with the characters it changes, and copies its CSS.

Katagami draws Latin, Greek and Cyrillic itself. It merges 19 more scripts, among them Devanagari, Arabic, Ethiopic and Khmer, from open-source outlines under the same license. Chinese, Japanese and Korean come from the four Katagami CJK companions.

Together they set the main language of places where 99.9 percent of people live. The map shows where.

Katagami has no italics yet. Version 0.1 is upright in every member, and italics come after hand corrections to the uprights. A browser asked for italic slants the upright to fake it.

Each member is one variable font with a weight axis. The files name every weight from Thin to Black, and Katagami Mono from Thin to Bold. Apps that do not handle variable fonts list those weights as separate styles.

Font-ify fetches a page and rewrites every font declaration with one fixed set of rules. It sets code in Katagami Mono, serif text in Katagami Serif and the rest in the member you pick, and it leaves icon fonts alone.

The rewrite runs in your browser. A bookmarklet does the same on the page you are reading.

The build scripts in the repository produce every glyph from open-source outlines. They square or round the curves, cut the widths and terminals, and compile each member to a variable font. Nothing is drawn by hand yet, and hand corrections come next.

The design spec lists every decision and its numbers, and About tells where it started.

Katagami are Japanese paper stencils for dyeing cloth, and the word 型紙 means pattern paper. The family is also made by cutting. Its curves are squared, its terminals are cut level, and its K is a square with three cuts. About has the rest.

Open an issue on GitHub with the member, the weight, the characters and a screenshot. Pull requests to the build scripts are welcome.