Libre baskerville font free download: the ZIP below holds 2 font files with a variable weight axis and 861 glyphs, plus the OFL licence.
Yes — Libre Baskerville is free for commercial use, including in books and long-form work you sell
Libre Baskerville is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (OFL). You can use it in client work, logos, products you sell, apps and print, without paying and without asking permission.
Libre Baskerville by Impallari Type is based on American Type Founders’ Baskerville from 1941, but deliberately altered for screens: a taller x-height, wider counters and noticeably less contrast than the original. It is optimised for body text at around 16px specifically — an unusually precise brief, and the reason it holds up where a faithful Baskerville revival would look spindly.
We read the license state from the font file itself rather than from a listing. The embedding permission flag (fsType) is 0 — Installable, the least restrictive value in the OpenType specification.
Quick facts
| Designer | Impallari Type |
| Added to Google Fonts | November 2012 |
| Version | Version 2.005 |
| License | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Commercial use | Yes, no attribution required |
Embedding (fsType) | 0 — Installable, unrestricted |
| Variable font | Yes — 1 axis (Weight) |
| Weights | 4 named (400 Regular → 700 Bold) |
| Glyphs | 861 |
| Characters covered | 789 |
| OpenType features | 14 |
| Vietnamese support | Not full |
| Download size | 160 KB — 2 font files + OFL.txt |
Download Libre Baskerville
What’s in the download
The download is a single ZIP containing 2 font files plus the licence:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| LibreBaskerville-Italic[wght].ttf | Variable italic — 1 axis: Weight |
| LibreBaskerville[wght].ttf | Variable upright — 1 axis: Weight |
OFL.txt travels with the files — keep it in the folder if you pass the font on to anyone else. Total download 160 KB.
The download includes the OFL license file. Keep it in the package if you redistribute the font.
Pairing suggestion. Newsreader on The Asset Crate — a free reading serif with an optical-size axis for finer control.
Libre Baskerville as body text under a sans headline: see pairing 4 in our Raleway font pairing guide for Canva.
See it in real layouts: 6 fonts that pair with Libre Baskerville in Canva, and why it overflows a text box built for another serif.
Internal link to our own coverage, not an external ad.
What the OFL license actually lets you do
You can:
- Use Libre Baskerville in commercial projects, including client work you bill for
- Use Libre Baskerville in a logo or brand identity, and trademark that logo
- Sell products that use Libre Baskerville — merchandise, packaging, book covers
- Embed Libre Baskerville in websites, apps, games, PDFs and ebooks
- Modify Libre Baskerville and redistribute your modified version
You cannot:
- Sell the font file on its own, outside a larger bundled product
- Distribute it without the OFL license file
- Release a modified version under a Reserved Font Name
No attribution is required in your design. The OFL only asks that the license file travels with the font files.
Inside the file: 861 glyphs and 789 characters
Libre Baskerville ships 861 glyphs covering 789 Unicode codepoints.
12 languages in full — Vietnamese not among them
Tested against the full alphabets of a reference set of languages, Libre Baskerville fully covers 12:
Spanish · French · German · Portuguese · Italian · Polish · Czech · Turkish · Romanian · Hungarian · Dutch · Nordic (da/no/sv)
Vietnamese is not fully covered in this file. If you need stacked diacritics such as ế, ộ, ữ and ỹ, test before committing.
Which Unicode blocks those 789 characters cover
| Block | Covered |
|---|---|
| Basic Latin | 95 / 96 |
| Latin-1 Supplement | 95 / 96 |
| Latin Extended-A | 126 / 128 |
| Latin Extended-B | 151 / 208 |
| IPA Extensions | 23 / 96 |
| Greek | 1 / 144 |
| Latin Extended Additional | 182 / 256 |
OpenType features: 14 in the file
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
aalt | All alternates |
case | Case-sensitive forms |
ccmp | Glyph composition |
dlig | Discretionary ligatures |
frac | Fractions |
kern | Kerning |
liga | Standard ligatures |
locl | Localized letterforms |
mark | Diacritic positioning |
mkmk | Mark-to-mark positioning |
ordn | Ordinals |
subs | Subscript |
Plus 2 further feature tags in the file, mostly stylistic-set and script-specific tables.
Variable axes: 1
- Weight (
wght): 400 to 700, continuous
Because this is a single variable file, every intermediate value is available. One file replaces the whole static weight set, which usually means a smaller total download than shipping three or four static cuts.
A tall x-height (0.530) — drawn to hold at small sizes
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Units per em | 1,000 |
| Ascender | 970 |
| Descender | -270 |
| Cap height ratio | 0.770 |
| x-height ratio | 0.530 |
An x-height ratio of 0.530 is high. Large lowercase letters make text look bigger at the same point size and hold up well at small sizes and on low-resolution screens — the trade is that long passages can feel dense.
Right for long reading, wrong at poster size
Good fit: Body text on the web at 16px, blogs, documentation, article layouts.
Poor fit: Large display settings, where the reduced contrast makes it look flat next to a true display serif.
Need something a free family cannot give you? Licensed families usually ship more weights, more alternates and a matched companion face:
Browse font families on Creative Market
Affiliate link — commission at no extra cost to you.
More free serif coverage
- Newsreader — a free reading serif with an optical-size axis for finer control
The license state and every technical figure on this page were read directly from the Libre Baskerville font binary — fsType embedding bits, glyph counts, character coverage, OpenType feature tables, variable-axis ranges and vertical metrics — not copied from a third-party listing. Last verified 23 August 2026 against version Version 2.005.
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