IBM Plex® Sans

Add the IBM Plex Sans typeface to your device

Please download the latest zip files from our releases page for installation.

Web usage

This project contains the following for web development:

• IBM Plex .woff2 and .woff files split into performant subsets of glyphs
• Cascading style sheet (CSS) code to reference any weight, variant and split
• Sass (SCSS) modules for more granular configuration and control of output css

We only include .woff2 and .woff files due to NPM package size limitation.

Installation with Node.js®:

npm install @ibm/plex-sans

Manually installing the files for web development can be done by downloading the latest web zip from our releases page.

Developers using the CSS files should keep the directory structure as is, so the font files will be found. If you’re importing the SCSS files, you can set the path of the font files by declaring $font-prefix: 'font-path-prefix' inside the @use. For example:

@use '@ibm/plex-sans/scss' as PlexSans with (
  $font-prefix: 'font-path'
);

@include PlexSans.all();

Font weights

We provide two ways of importing weights into your project. Using PlexSans.all() will import all available weights and PlexSans.default() will import only light, regular and semibold weight. You can also disable unwanted weights inside the @use. For example:

// Disable weights
@use '@ibm/plex-sans/scss' as PlexSans with (
  $font-weights: (
    bold: false,
    boldItalic: false,
    extralight: false,
    extralightItalic: false,
    italic: false,
    light: false,
    lightItalic: false,
    medium: false,
    mediumItalic: false,
    regular: false,
    semibold: false,
    semiboldItalic: false,
    text: false,
    textItalic: false,
    thin: false,
    thinItalic: false
  )
);

@include PlexSans.all();

IBM Plex Sans typeface weights map:

Weight	Enabled by default with	PlexSans.all()	PlexSans.default()
bold		✅	✅
boldItalic		✅	❌
extralight		✅	❌
extralightItalic		✅	❌
italic		✅	❌
light		✅	❌
lightItalic		✅	❌
medium		✅	❌
mediumItalic		✅	❌
regular		✅	✅
semibold		✅	✅
semiboldItalic		✅	❌
text		✅	❌
textItalic		✅	❌
thin		✅	❌
thinItalic		✅	❌

Below are the font-family rules for the family:

font-family: 'IBM Plex Sans';

Building the fonts from source

Requirements

To build binary font files from .vfb sources you need FontLab Studio 5. A Python script called IBM Plex export FDK files.py is necessary to export the proper files from FontLab. To run this script you’ll need the RoboFab library. Also, you’ll need to have the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO) installed.

Building one font

From FontLab, run IBM Plex export FDK files.py and choose a directory with IBM Plex .vfb source files. The script will create a new directory called fdk in which subdirectories are created for every font. The script will export files necessary for AFDKO in those subdirectories.

Subsequently, OpenType Fonts (OTFs) or TrueType Fonts (TTFs) can be generated from the command line using makeotf, which is part of the AFDKO toolset. Information and usage instructions can be found by executing makeotf -h.

IBM Telemetry

This package uses IBM Telemetry to collect de-identified and anonymized metrics data. By installing this package as a dependency you are agreeing to telemetry collection. To opt out, see Opting out of IBM Telemetry data collection. For more information on the data being collected, please see the IBM Telemetry documentation.