As part of a small redesign on this website, I wanted to use a high-quality and elegant font that also looked good with text in italics and displaying content in bold, but specially when combining both styles, which is something more difficult to find.

After doing some research and comparing a few different fonts, I started to use the Lato Google font. However, even though it looked quite good, I was not fully convinced.

After a few hours comparing different fonts, it became quite hard for me to spot differences between them so I called it a day. The next morning, a bit fresher, I decided to know a bit more about Lato so I went to its website to immediately see how beautiful the font looked on that page.

That font was different to the one I was currently using from Google Fonts, so I checked the content of that page and discovered a few interesting things:

  • The Lato website was using the LatoLatinWeb font family
  • There’s a 2.0 (2.015) version of the Lato font family avail­able as a free down­load under the SIL Open Font License 1.1
  • It is specified that:

    The older ver­sion (1.0) of the Lato font fam­ily is avail­able on Google Fonts. We have no infor­ma­tion when Lato 2.0 will be avail­able on Google Fonts

This GitHub issue (opened on the 9th April 2015) explains why Lato 2.0 is still not available on Google Fonts. It seem that Lato 2.015 uses a newer version of ttfauothint, which now produces a different result. Apparently, there was a deployment of that font version on Google Fonts in January 2017, but it had to be rolled out because it affected quite a few users (Overnight my Lato looks quite different).

At that point, and taking all things into consideration, I decided that I still wanted to use the 2.0 version of the Lato font family on my website. This is how you can do it:

  • Download the Lato2OFLWeb Webfonts
    • In my case:Version 2.015
  • Follow the instructions included in the README-WEB.txt file
  • Select the font styles to be used
    • In my case: LatoLatin-Regular, LatoLatin-Italic, LatoLatin-Bold, and LatoLatin-BoldItalic from the LatoLatin group
  • Copy the selected font style files to the website location where the static content is served from
  • Inspect the latolatinfonts.css style sheet and use the CSS rules for the selected font styles
  • Use LatoLatinWeb as a font-family
  • Credit the authors of the Lato font for the original creation

Finally, just enjoy the 2.0 version of the Lato font family!

2020-04-18 - Update:

Text amendments.