Comic Relief is a typeface designed to be metrically equivalent to the popular Comic Sans MS. Comic Relief can be used in place of Comic Sans MS without having to move, resize, or reset any part of the copy. Perfect for missing cat posters and all of your WordArt needs!
Comic Relief is copylefted using the SIL Open Font License, so feel free to use it, modify it, or embed it as you see fit. It is available here on GitHub and Google Fonts.
Comic Relief includes every glyph in Comic Sans MS Regular and Bold, as it existed in standard copies of Windows 7 and earlier. An italic variant of Comic Sans MS was introduced in Windows 8, but Comic Relief does not have a metrically-equivalent italic variant. An italic variant is the next major feature... eventually.
Similarly, there is a "Pro" version of Comic Sans that includes additional glyphs, swashes, ligatures, etc. Comic Relief is not a metrically equivalent replacement for Comic Sans Pro, but some sort of "Comic Relief Preaux" typeface is on the list of someday-when-I-have-more-time projects.
In order to get Comic Relief to a state suitable for inclusion in Google Fonts a small number of glyphs have been added, technically making the Comic Relief character set a slight superset of the Comic Sans MS character set.
Comic Relief is in maintenance mode. Bugfixes to the Regular and Bold weights will be prioritized, but there is no timeline for italic or Preaux variants. Please file a bug if you find an issue or would like to see something tweaked. Contributions are very welcome, especially if you want to tackle italic or Preaux.
Fonts are built automatically by GitHub Actions - take a look in the "Actions" tab for the latest build.
The build and test process is customized from the googlefonts-project-template. Comic Relief is drawn in FontForge and an extra step is needed to convert the .sfd sources to .ufo and the automated builds are a bit of a house of cards that you don't want to try running on Windows. If you are not worried about automated building and tests, you can open the .sfd project files in the /sources/ folder with FontForge on Windows or Linux and export in any common font format.
If you want to build fonts manually on your own computer:
- run
scripts/convert.shto convert .sfd sources to .ufo make buildwill produce font files from .ufo filesmake testwill run FontBakery's quality assurance testsmake proofwill generate HTML proof files
The proof files and QA tests are also available automatically via GitHub Actions - look at https://loudifier.github.io/Comic-Relief.
V1.210 6 May 2025
- Fixed width of bold Cyrillic glyphs 'ю' and 'о'
- Update build process to generate .ufo sources using FontForge, which avoids a bug in sfdlib that clips points outside glyph extents in characters like 'Ω'
- Disable gftools/fontmake autohinting. Makes characters softer at small sizes, but more even overall. Fixes issues like stems of 'm' and 'n' sitting at different heights.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://scripts.sil.org/OFL
This font repository structure is inspired by Unified Font Repository v0.3, modified for the Google Fonts workflow.