Gloss Manuscript

Gloss Manuscript is an open-source serif family for legal, editorial, and long-form reading. It includes three coordinated styles:

• Regular
• Italic
• Bold

The family was drawn as a custom project from a commissioned raster design. No third-party font binary or donor font outline was incorporated into the build. Version 1.005 uses normalized left/right sidebearings and kerning from Windows Garamond 2.40 as an optical-spacing reference, retains the Gloss outlines' own ink widths, and applies compact -28-unit alphabetic tracking; it does not contain Garamond outlines.

Download

Desktop TrueType fonts are in fonts/ttf. Webfonts are in fonts/woff2.

Specimens

• Long-reading proof — ten pages of selectable, embedded text
• Family specimen and QA proof — character sets, features, comparisons, and working sizes
• Word no-kerning spacing test — live-text application proof at normal character spacing and 100% scale
• Version 1.004 spacing-model proof — unkerned Word-like comparison of the former and corrected models
• Version 1.005 compact-tracking proof — before/after and three-style QA with kerning disabled

Features

• Regular, Italic, and Bold
• Extended Latin coverage
• Kerning and mark positioning
• Standard and discretionary ligatures
• Small caps
• Oldstyle and lining figures
• Superior and inferior figures
• Fractions
• TTF and WOFF2 formats

Install

Windows

Open fonts/ttf, select the three .ttf files, right-click, and choose Install or Install for all users.

macOS

Open each .ttf file in Font Book and select Install Font.

Linux

Copy the .ttf files to ~/.local/share/fonts/ and run fc-cache -f.

Web

@font-face {
  font-family: "Gloss Manuscript";
  src: url("fonts/woff2/GlossManuscript-Regular.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
}

@font-face {
  font-family: "Gloss Manuscript";
  src: url("fonts/woff2/GlossManuscript-Italic.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-style: italic;
  font-weight: 400;
}

@font-face {
  font-family: "Gloss Manuscript";
  src: url("fonts/woff2/GlossManuscript-Bold.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 700;
}

Version

Version 1.005, released 18 July 2026. This release tightens every alphabetic advance by 28 units per em after outline-aware sidebearing matching. The result is a deliberately compact text color in Word even when pair kerning is disabled. Word-space and figure widths remain unchanged.

License

The font software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, with Gloss Manuscript as a Reserved Font Name.