No. 10 / 16 · Serif · DisplaySpecimen · 2026-10-27
Cap 700X 468Base 0Desc −249Outline
A display Didone drawn as Bézier outlines: hairline serifs, bracketed joins and ball terminals on thin necks.
Try it
72 px · kerning on · click the text to edit it
How it is built
Bowls are cubic superellipses, an outer curve minus an inner one, so the thick sides and the hairline tops and bottoms are exact. Serifs are thin slabs joined to the stem by circular brackets; arm ends taper into beaks with a concave inner edge; curve ends hang a ball terminal off a hairline neck.
Shapes that a broad pen would write, like S and the 2, are traced by stamping a flat nib along a skeleton, then refitted as smooth cubics. Full upper and lowercase, figures and the Spanish accents, with capitals and lowercase kerned separately.
A vector face: it works at any size. The tester and the waterfall use the house steps.
- NodeAn on-curve point at (44, 700). 31 in this glyph.
- HandleAn off-curve point at (588, 627). Cubic Béziers: two handles per curve, read from the .otf. 18 here.
- Advance735 units wide: 44 of space on the left, 44 on the right.
- BracketA circular bracket joins the hairline serif to the stem.
How it fits
- UnkernedThe second letter where its advance width alone would put it: hairline.
- KernedThe pair as the font sets it, pulled in by the value under it, in units of a 1000-unit em.
Every size it is drawn for
All 105 characters
- Char
- R
- Code point
- U+0052
- Glyph
- R
- Advance
- 735
- LSB · RSB
- 44 · 44
- Contours · points
- 2 · 50
Uppercase · 26
Lowercase · 26
Figures · 10
Accents · 20
Punctuation and symbols · 23
Good at
Canciones Españolas
Recital · Sala 4 · 19:30
Aria
Get Cantilena
TTF for desktops, WOFF2 for the web, or the zip with both, the licence and a readme. Free for anything, commercial included, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Buy me a coffee ↗Optional. The fonts stay free.
@font-face {
font-family: "Cantilena";
src: url("Cantilena-Regular.woff2") format("woff2");
font-weight: 400;
font-display: swap;
}
h1 { font-family: "Cantilena", sans-serif; }