Essenfont ships as a single OpenType Collection (OTC) containing CFF2 outlines + CBDT color bitmaps. It’s also available as per-plane WOFF2 subsets for the web.

Fontist (recommended for tooling)

Fontist is the Ruby-based font package manager. It downloads the OTC, registers it with the local font system, and tracks updates via fontist update.

# Install the Fontist gem
gem install fontist

# Install Essenfont (downloads the OTC + registers it locally)
fontist install "Essenfont"

npm (for build pipelines)

Pull the font into any Node-based build (Vite, Astro, Next.js). The package exports per-plane WOFF2 files and TypeScript types.

npm install essenfont

Direct download

Latest release binaries live at GitHub Releases.

# macOS / Linux
curl -L -o Essenfont-Regular.otc \
  https://github.com/essenfont/essenfont/releases/latest/download/Essenfont-Regular.otc

# Windows (PowerShell)
Invoke-WebRequest \
  https://github.com/essenfont/essenfont/releases/latest/download/Essenfont-Regular.otc \
  -OutFile Essenfont-Regular.otc

Per-plane WOFF2 (web embed)

For sites that don’t want the full OTC, the build emits per-plane WOFF2 subsets. Each one covers its plane’s entire assigned range via a single @font-face entry.

Next: CSS integration →