Charis SIL or Charis () is a

slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

developed by

SIL International SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expan ...

based on Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed for laser printers. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. Its design goal is to "provide a single

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

-based font family that would contain a comprehensive inventory of

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s needed for almost any Roman- or

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

-based writing system, whether used for phonetic or orthographic needs." Charis SIL supports

Graphite Graphite () is a Crystallinity, crystalline allotrope (form) of the element carbon. It consists of many stacked Layered materials, layers of graphene, typically in excess of hundreds of layers. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable ...

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

, and AAT technologies for advanced rendering features. Along with

Doulos SIL Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL Inte ...

and

Gentium Gentium (, from the Latin for "of the nations") is a Unicode serif typeface family designed by Victor Gaultney. Gentium fonts are free and open source software, and are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), which permits modification ...

, it is licensed under the

SIL Open Font License The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license. It was created by SIL Global, the ...

(OFL), and can be downloaded free of charge. Version 6.2 of the font, with over 3,800 glyphs, was released on 1 February 2023. Version 7 was released on 2 June 2025. Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in the word-processor. For example, for primer-style 'a' and 'g', append ss01=1 to the name of the font in the font-selection window. (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand – see images at left.) Alternatively, customized versions of the fonts can be created with TypeTuner, prior to download, that have those forms preset. Features that may be chosen include small capitals, primer-style 'a' and 'g', roman-style 'a' and 'g' in italic typeface, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', large

modifier letter apostrophe The modifier letter apostrophe () is a letter found in Unicode encoding, used primarily for various glottal sounds. It was used for the apostrophe in early Unicode versions. Encoding The letter apostrophe is encoded at , which is in the ' ...

and

Saltillo Saltillo () is the capital and largest city of the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila and is also the municipal seat of the municipality of the same name. Mexico City, Monterrey, and Saltillo are all connected by a major railroad and high ...

, Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics (in Cyrillic), staveless tone letters, and automatic fractions.Charis: features
/ref> Phonetician

John C. Wells John Christopher Wells (born 11 March 1939) is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for ...

has recommended Charis SIL as an excellent font for displaying IPA symbols. Since version 7, it is now simply called Charis.

Sources

References

External links

Charis homepageSmart Unicode typefaces released under free licenseLinux.com
article on Charis SIL and its release as open source.
Using IPA fonts with Mac OS X: The Comprehensive Guide
a guide to setting up and using Charis SIL and the International Phonetic Alphabet characters on Mac OS X
TypeTuner Web homepage
{{free and open-source typography Transitional serif typefaces Slab serif typefaces Free software Unicode typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2006 IPA typefaces