Playfair display font free download: the ZIP below holds 2 font files with a variable weight axis and 1,103 glyphs, plus the OFL licence.
Yes — Playfair Display is free for commercial use, including in books and long-form work you sell
Playfair Display 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.
Playfair belongs to a specific moment: the late-18th-century shift in Europe from broad-nib quills to pointed steel pens. Together with better printing, ink and paper, that shift made high contrast and delicate hairlines fashionable — letterforms increasingly detached from anything a hand had written. Claus Eggers Sørensen’s design is not a revival of one specific face; it takes influence from that whole transitional period.
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 | Claus Eggers Sørensen |
| Added to Google Fonts | November 2011 |
| Version | Version 1.203 |
| 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 | 6 named (400 Regular → 900 Black) |
| Glyphs | 1,103 |
| Characters covered | 659 |
| OpenType features | 23 |
| Vietnamese support | Yes, full |
| Download size | 263 KB — 2 font files + OFL.txt |
Download Playfair Display
What’s in the download
The download is a single ZIP containing 2 font files plus the licence:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| PlayfairDisplay-Italic[wght].ttf | Variable italic — 1 axis: Weight |
| PlayfairDisplay[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 263 KB.
The download includes the OFL license file. Keep it in the package if you redistribute the font.
Pairing suggestion. Marjolaine on The Asset Crate — a premium display serif sitting between a delicate slab and a typewriter face.
Playfair Display as a headline over a clean sans: see our Raleway pairings and Poppins pairings for Canva.
Playfair Display next to another high-contrast serif is a common mistake: see the pair to avoid in our Cormorant Garamond pairing guide for Canva.
Internal link to our own coverage, not an external ad.
What the OFL license actually lets you do
You can:
- Use Playfair Display in commercial projects, including client work you bill for
- Use Playfair Display in a logo or brand identity, and trademark that logo
- Sell products that use Playfair Display — merchandise, packaging, book covers
- Embed Playfair Display in websites, apps, games, PDFs and ebooks
- Modify Playfair Display 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: 1,103 glyphs and 659 characters
Playfair Display ships 1,103 glyphs covering 659 Unicode codepoints.
Vietnamese, and 13 other languages in full
Tested against the full alphabets of a reference set of languages, Playfair Display fully covers 14:
Vietnamese · Spanish · French · German · Portuguese · Italian · Polish · Czech · Turkish · Romanian · Hungarian · Dutch · Nordic (da/no/sv) · Cyrillic
Vietnamese is fully supported, including stacked diacritics such as ế, ộ, ữ and ỹ — worth checking before you commit, because many free families stop at Latin Extended-A and silently drop them.
Which Unicode blocks those 659 characters cover
| Block | Covered |
|---|---|
| Basic Latin | 95 / 96 |
| Latin-1 Supplement | 95 / 96 |
| Latin Extended-A | 128 / 128 |
| Latin Extended-B | 30 / 208 |
| IPA Extensions | 2 / 96 |
| Greek | 4 / 144 |
| Cyrillic | 122 / 256 |
OpenType features: 23 in the file
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
aalt | All alternates |
c2sc | Caps to small caps |
calt | Contextual alternates |
case | Case-sensitive forms |
ccmp | Glyph composition |
dlig | Discretionary ligatures |
frac | Fractions |
kern | Kerning |
liga | Standard ligatures |
lnum | Lining figures |
locl | Localized letterforms |
mark | Diacritic positioning |
Plus 11 further feature tags in the file, mostly stylistic-set and script-specific tables.
Variable axes: 1
- Weight (
wght): 400 to 900, 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 mid-range x-height (0.514) — why it works across sizes
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Units per em | 1,000 |
| Ascender | 1,082 |
| Descender | -251 |
| Cap height ratio | 0.708 |
| x-height ratio | 0.514 |
An x-height ratio of 0.514 sits in the normal middle band — no strong bias toward either small-size legibility or display elegance, which is part of why it works across a range of sizes.
Right for long reading, wrong at poster size
Good fit: Editorial headlines, magazine titling, luxury and fashion branding, quotes set large.
Poor fit: Small text and low-resolution screens, where the hairlines break up.
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
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More free serif coverage
- Marjolaine — a premium display serif sitting between a delicate slab and a typewriter face
The license state and every technical figure on this page were read directly from the Playfair Display 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 1.203.
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