What is plex?

IBM Plex is the official corporate typeface of IBM, released as an open-source font family under the Open Font License. That license allows anyone to download, use, and modify the fonts freely, including in commercial products. The typeface took two years to design and is described in the README as distinctly IBM in character. The family comes in four main styles: Sans (clean, without decorative strokes), Serif (with the traditional small strokes at the ends of letterforms), Mono (fixed-width, intended for displaying code or terminal output), and Sans Condensed (a narrower version of the sans-serif style). Each style includes both upright and true italic variants. One of the defining features of the Plex family is its language coverage. IBM Plex Sans supports extended Latin characters as well as Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Thai scripts. This breadth reflects IBM's identity as a global company, and each script family is available as a separate npm package for use in web projects. The repository also includes IBM Plex Math, a companion font for scientific and academic writing. It contains over 5,000 glyphs covering mathematical symbols, Greek letters, arrows, operators, Fraktur characters, and geometric shapes. According to the README, it is designed to pair with IBM Plex Serif and is positioned as an alternative to existing academic math fonts. Fonts can be downloaded as ZIP archives from the releases page or installed via npm packages. Each sub-family has its own package, such as @ibm/plex-sans or @ibm/plex-mono, making it straightforward to include only the scripts or styles a project needs.