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EB Garamond
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 | |
| Category | Serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Old-style |
| Designers | Claude Garamont, Robert Granjon, Georg Mayr-Duffner, Octavio Pardo and others |
| Date released | 2011 |
| Glyphs | 3,218 |
| License | OFL |
| Website | Download from Octavio Pardo’s repository Georg Mayr-Duffner about EB Garamond |
| Latest release date | 29 October 2017 |
EB Garamond is a free and open source implementation of Claude Garamond’s typeface, Garamond, and the matching Italic, Greek and Cyrillic characters designed by Robert Granjon. Its name is a shortening of Egenolff–Berner Garamond; the letter forms are taken from the Egenolff–Berner specimen printed in 1592.
Implementation history
[edit]
In 2011 the Austrian designer Georg Mayr-Duffner[2] released the EB Garamond under the Open Font License. Mayr-Duffner took the letterforms from a scan of a specimen known as the “Berner specimen” which was printed in 1592 by Conrad Berner, son-in-law of Christian Egenolff and his successor at the Egenolff print office. It shows Garamont's roman and Granjon's italic fonts at different sizes. The Greek characters are based on Robert Granjon's work as well. In addition the font includes OpenType features such as swash italic capitals and schoolbook alternates.[3] Duffner's intention was to include multiple optical sizes. As of 2014 his implementation included fonts based on the 8 and 12 point forms from the 1592 specimen, but lacked the bold font faces. As Georg Mayr-Duffner couldn't complete the bold weights for personal reasons, Google commissioned the Spanish type designer Octavio Pardo[4] to continue the project. As of 2018 Pardo's implementation includes 5 weights (Regular, Medium, Semi-Bold, Bold and Extra-Bold), both in regular and italic style.
Technical details
[edit]Mayr-Duffner implemented the EB Garamond originally in FontForge using the SFDIR and UFO format. Octavio Pardo switched to the proprietary font editor Glyphs that supports multiple master fonts. Pardo's implementation is hence based on two masters, Regular and Bold. The other weights are generated from the masters. The letter forms and the kerning of Pardo's Regular are identical with Mayr-Duffner's EB Garamond 12. The source of the fonts is drawn with cubic Bézier curves, thus the OTF-version (CFF-style) version of the compiled fonts should be preferred over the TTF-version, as TTF requires quadratic Bézier curves which have to be generated by lossy conversion during the compilation from the source files.
EBGaramond-Maths
[edit]EBGaramond-Maths is a package for LaTeX that provides a version of the EB Garamond 12 for mathematics. Its maintainer is Clea F. Rees.[5]
Garamond-Math
[edit]Garamond-Math is an additional OpenType font file for the EB Garamond family containing symbols for mathematics. The file is provided by Yuansheng Zhao.[6]
OpenType features
[edit]
As of 2018, EB Garamond includes the following OpenType features:
| aalt | Access All Alternates | lnum | Lining Figures | ss02 | Stylistic Set 2 |
| c2pc | Petite Capitals From Capitals | mark | Mark Positioning | ss03 | Stylistic Set 3 |
| c2sc | Small Capitals From Capitals | mkmk | Mark to Mark Positioning | ss04 | Stylistic Set 4 |
| case | Case-Sensitive Forms | onum | Oldstyle Figures | ss05 | Stylistic Set 5 |
| dlig | Discretionary Ligatures | ordn | Ordinals | ss06 | Stylistic Set 6 |
| frac | Fractions | pcap | Petite Capitals | ss07 | Stylistic Set 7 |
| hist | Historical Forms | pnum | Proportional Figures | subs | Subscript |
| hlig | Historical Ligatures | sinf | Scientific Inferiors | sups | Superscript |
| kern | Kerning | smcp | Small Capitals | swsh | Swash |
| liga | Standard Ligatures | ss01 | Stylistic Set 1 | tnum | Tabular Figures |
The feature list and additional information can be obtained by tools like otfinfo (e.g. otfinfo -f `kpsewhich EBGaramond-Regular.otf`) or FontDrop!.
Economy
[edit]A comparison of different fonts found that Garamond (not EB Garamond specifically) was significantly more economical of toner or ink than most others, including some designed specifically for economy, though Garamond also sets smaller at the same nominal point size.[7]
Reception
[edit]The prominent typeface designer Erik Spiekermann described the EB Garamond as "one of the best open source fonts".[8]
Availability
[edit]Web
[edit]- Georg Mayr-Duffner's implementation lacking the bold faces is available from his GitHub repository.[9] It is still possible to generate font files from that repository using OpenBSD or Linux.[10]
- Octavio Pardo's newer version can be downloaded as OTF and TTF files from his repository.[11]
- Pardo's version is also available for embedding through Google Fonts[12] and through Adobe Fonts.[13]
LaTeX
[edit]As Classic LaTeX font
[edit]EB Garamond is also distributed via the CTAN mirrors as LaTeX font package.[14] Therefore, it can be easily applied to LaTeX based documents by adding \usepackage{ebgaramond} to the document preamble. Unfortunately the classic LaTeX font system cannot make use of all characters and OpenType features offered by EB Garamond, but this can be solved by using the XeTeX smart font subsystem.
Through XeTeX
[edit]Nowadays LaTeX supports the three smart font technologies OpenType, AAT and Graphite directly through XeTeX, which has to be activated in one's LaTeX editor. Using the editor LyX, this can be done by checking a box under LyX > Document > Settings > […] use XeTeX. This means adding \use_non_tex_fonts true to the header of the .lyx document files. Then all OpenType, AAT and Graphite fonts installed locally on your OS can be used directly.
In order to access the smart font features of EB Garamond, some code has to be added to the document preamble. E.g. to set EB Garamond as the document main font using old style figures and the OpenType Stylistic Set 6 (long-tailed Q), the following code can be used:
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{EB Garamond}[Numbers={OldStyle;Proportional},RawFeature={+ss06}]Another method to achieve the same result is the following specification:
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{EB Garamond}[RawFeature={+onum;+pnum;+ss06}]References
[edit]- ^ Type Specimen Facsimiles, p. 4
- ^ "Georg Duffner". luc.devroye.org. Retrieved 2025-09-27.
- ^ Duffner, Georg. "EB Garamond specimen". Retrieved 19 September 2015.
- ^ "Octavio Pardo". luc.devroye.org. Retrieved 2025-09-27.
- ^ "Index of /fonts/ebgaramond-maths". ctan.mirror.rafal.ca. Retrieved 2025-09-27.
- ^ Zhao, Yuansheng (2025-08-27), YuanshengZhao/Garamond-Math, retrieved 2025-09-27
- ^ Errera, Rob (16 June 2023). "Which Fonts Use The Least Ink & Toner? [We Tested 7 Different Fonts]". Toner Buzz.
- ^ Spiekermann, Erik. "Twitter post". Twitter. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
- ^ Georg Mayr-Duffner’s GitHub repository
- ^ Penzin, Vadim. "Typography: Building EB Garamond". Retrieved 25 June 2019.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Octavio Pardo’s EB Garamond repository
- ^ "EB Garamond". Google Fonts. Retrieved 2 February 2022.
- ^ "EB Garamond". Adobe Fonts. Adobe. Retrieved 2 February 2022.
- ^ EB Garamond distribution at a CTAN mirror
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EB Garamond
View on Grokipediafrom Grokipedia
History and Development
Origins and Inspiration
EB Garamond originates from the humanist typefaces developed in the mid-16th century by the French punchcutter Claude Garamond (c. 1510–1561), whose designs introduced elegant old-style serifs that closely mimicked the fluidity and structure of Renaissance handwriting while establishing typefounding as a specialized craft.[2] These typefaces, primarily roman in style, were complemented by slanted italics created by fellow punchcutter Robert Granjon (c. 1513–1590), who contributed innovative cursive forms that enhanced readability and aesthetic harmony in printed works.[2] Together, their contributions during the 1520s–1560s marked a pivotal era in typography, influenced by earlier Venetian humanists like Aldus Manutius and shaping the garalde family of serifs.[2] The primary source material for EB Garamond is the 1592 Egenolff–Berner specimen sheet, a landmark type catalog compiled by Conrad Berner, son-in-law of printer Christian Egenolff, which displayed an extensive collection of punches from various European foundries.[4] This specimen prominently features Garamond's roman letters and Granjon's matching italics across multiple sizes, serving as a direct reference for authentic proportions, stroke weights, and character details from the period.[2] Initiated in 2011 by Austrian type designer Georg Duffner, the EB Garamond project emerged as a community-driven open-source initiative to digitally revive these 16th-century designs, prioritizing fidelity to the original punchcut forms over contemporary reinterpretations.[5] Duffner's motivation was to address the limitations of proprietary Garamond variants by producing a freely available font that faithfully reproduces the historical letterforms, enabling broader access for digital typesetting while preserving typographic authenticity.[4] This approach emphasizes scanning and tracing from high-resolution images of the Egenolff–Berner sheet to capture subtle irregularities and optical adjustments inherent in hand-cut punches.[2]Key Contributors and Milestones
The EB Garamond project was initiated by Austrian type designer Georg Duffner in 2011 as an open-source revival of 16th-century Garamond typefaces, with the first public release that year providing support for basic Latin characters under the SIL Open Font License.[6][5] In 2017, type designer Octavio Pardo joined the project, expanding its scope by developing additional weights from Regular to ExtraBold across roman and italic styles, completing five weights by 2018 while incorporating Greek (including polytonic) and Cyrillic scripts to broaden multilingual compatibility.[7][5][8] This expansion increased the total glyph count to 3,218 by 2018, enhancing the font's utility for diverse typographic applications.[9] A significant technical milestone occurred in November 2019, when the font family was updated to a variable font format, enabling smoother interpolation between weights and improved performance for web deployment.[10] Project maintenance continued under the SIL Open Font License, with Georg Mayr-Duffner (Duffner's full name) conducting repository updates in April and May 2023 to merge elements from the original and Pardo's contributions into a unified version.[11] No major releases have occurred in Pardo's repository since 2021.[11][12] In April 2024, the LaTeX package for EB Garamond was updated (version 2024-04-23) to support the latest font files and features.[13]Design Characteristics
Core Typographic Elements
EB Garamond embodies humanist proportions characteristic of Renaissance typography, with letterforms designed to evoke the organic flow of handwriting while maintaining a structured upright posture. This approach results in low contrast between thick and thin strokes, creating a balanced and readable appearance that prioritizes harmony over dramatic variation, directly inspired by the calligraphic traditions of 16th-century punchcutters like Claude Garamont.[1][2] The typeface features subtle, bracketed serifs that gently curve into the stems, contributing to its classical old-style aesthetic. These serifs include ascending and descending terminals on lowercase letters such as 'a' and 'y', which add a refined, tapered elegance reminiscent of historical printing. Distinctive letterforms further define its character, including a long-tailed uppercase 'Q' that extends gracefully below the baseline and a double-story lowercase 'g' with a looped form, both faithfully reproducing elements from Garamont's original designs as seen in the 1592 Egenolff–Berner specimen.[3][2] The italic variant draws heavily from Robert Granjon's calligraphic influences, incorporating slanted, compressed forms with pronounced cursiveness that complement the roman uprights without overwhelming them. This integration positions EB Garamond as a true classical Garamond revival, emphasizing historical fidelity to mid-16th-century sources over the smoother, more rationalized interpretations found in neoclassical variants like Adobe Garamond Pro.[1][2]Weights, Optical Sizes, and Language Support
EB Garamond offers five static weights in both roman and italic styles: Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and ExtraBold. These weights provide a range from light to heavy emphasis, suitable for varied typographic hierarchies in body text and headings. Since November 2019, the family has been expanded to include a variable font format with a weight axis, enabling smooth interpolation between these weights for more flexible design applications.[3][4] The font family incorporates two primary optical sizes to optimize legibility across different usage scales: an 8pt variant tailored for small text such as footnotes and captions, and a 12pt variant designed for general reading and display purposes. In the 8pt size, design adjustments include wider stems and simplified forms to counteract the optical reduction in detail at smaller scales, ensuring consistent readability. Conversely, the 12pt size features refined serifs and more intricate details, enhancing elegance without compromising clarity in larger settings. These adaptations draw from historical typesetting practices, where separate cuttings were created for specific sizes to maintain visual balance.[14] EB Garamond supports an extensive range of languages through its coverage of extended Latin, polytonic Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, making it suitable for multilingual publications in Western, Eastern European, and Hellenic contexts. The family includes a total of 3,218 glyphs, encompassing small caps, petite caps, swashes, and decorative initials inspired by 16th-century sources. This comprehensive glyph set also incorporates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for linguistic applications, prioritizing humanist proportions while accommodating diverse orthographic needs.[4][2]Technical Implementation
OpenType Features
EB Garamond incorporates a comprehensive set of OpenType features designed to enhance typographic flexibility and fidelity to historical printing practices, allowing users to access variant glyphs and contextual adjustments directly within compatible software. These features are embedded in the font's OpenType tables, enabling seamless integration in applications such as Adobe InDesign for print design or CSS properties like font-feature-settings for web rendering, without the need for multiple font variants.[4] Key among these is support for small capitals via the smcp feature, which substitutes lowercase letters with scaled versions of uppercase forms to maintain visual harmony in all-caps contexts, such as bibliographic entries or emphasis. The font also includes c2sc for converting full-size capitals to small caps when combined with smcp. Additionally, swash capitals (swsh) provide elegant, calligraphic italic uppercase letters, exemplified by a flourished 'Q' in phrases like "Queen Elizabeth," adding decorative flair suitable for titles or invitations.[15][2] Stylistic alternates are accessible through eight stylistic sets (ss01–ss08), offering users a selection of historical or aesthetic glyph variants to customize the typeface's appearance. For instance, ss06 activates alternate forms of letters like 'Q' and 'g', providing a more restrained or period-appropriate design in italic contexts, such as in "egg" or "Qyteti," to better evoke Renaissance typography.[16][15] Ligature support includes standard ligatures (liga) for common combinations like 'fi' and 'fl' to improve letter spacing and readability, as seen in words like "refined" or "efficiency." Discretionary ligatures (dlig) extend this to optional pairs such as 'ct' and 'st,' which can be invoked for refined historical effects in phrases like "casted" or "théâtre," enhancing the font's suitability for book design. The font further supports historical ligatures (hlig) for period-specific forms like 's+t' and 'c+t.'[2][15] Old-style figures (onum) deliver lowered, non-aligning numerals that blend with lowercase text, ideal for narrative content, while positional forms include proportional old-style, tabular old-style, proportional lining, and tabular lining options for precise alignment in financial or tabular data. Fractions (frac) permit the automatic formation of stacked fractions, such as 1⁄2 or 3⁄4, facilitating mathematical or culinary typesetting without manual kerning. These elements collectively allow EB Garamond to adapt dynamically to diverse layout needs while preserving its classical serif structure.[15][2]Mathematical Extensions
The mathematical extensions for EB Garamond enable its use in typesetting complex equations, particularly through specialized packages and fonts that incorporate Unicode mathematical symbols while maintaining stylistic harmony with the base typeface. One key development is the ebgaramond-maths LaTeX package, authored by Clea F. Rees and first released in 2014. This package facilitates the integration of EB Garamond into mathematical expressions when compiling with pdfLaTeX, leveraging the font's italic variant for math alphabets and pairing it with the newtxmath package for additional symbols such as operators and relations. It generates necessary Type 1 font metrics and encodings to ensure compatibility, allowing users to achieve a cohesive Garamond-style appearance in documents without requiring full OpenType math support. The latest version, 1.3, was released on February 19, 2025, updating compatibility with the April 2024 version of ebgaramond and fixing issues such as support for the mu unit.[17][18] Complementing this is the garamond-math OpenType font, developed by Yuansheng Zhao and Xiangdong Zeng, with its initial version dated January 2022. Designed explicitly to match the proportions and aesthetics of EB Garamond (both the Octavio Pardo and Georg Mayr-Duffner variants), it includes comprehensive OpenType MATH tables for native support in modern TeX engines. The font incorporates glyphs for integrals (with options for inversion symmetry via Stylistic Set 7), binary and relational operators (including larger variants via Stylistic Set 11), and extensible delimiters, drawing from sources like XITS Math and Libertinus Math while adding custom designs where needed. Font metrics are generated using FontForge and Python scripts to optimize spacing and alignment in mathematical layouts.[19][20] These extensions differ from the base EB Garamond by providing dedicated mathematical character sets, including bold math italics (accessible via semi-bold or extra-bold Stylistic Sets 4 and 5) and script styles for calligraphic alphabets (via Stylistic Sets 3 and 8), which are essential for advanced equation rendering. In XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, garamond-math integrates seamlessly with the unicode-math package, enabling automatic selection of appropriate variants and ensuring precise kerning and scaling for superscripts, subscripts, and stacked fractions. While ebgaramond-maths focuses on legacy pdfLaTeX workflows, garamond-math extends capabilities to full Unicode math, supporting extensible arrows and radicals without relying on external symbol fonts.[17][20]Usage and Availability
Web and Digital Platforms
EB Garamond is accessible on Google Fonts, where it has been available since its initial release in 2011 as part of the open-source project led by Georg Duffner.[10] This platform enables easy embedding via CSS @font-face rules, allowing web developers to incorporate the font into websites without additional licensing fees due to its SIL Open Font License.[10] In November 2019, the family was updated to include variable font support, providing a single file that covers multiple weights and styles for efficient loading.[10] The font is also integrated into Adobe Fonts, where it can be activated for use across Creative Cloud applications such as Adobe XD, Illustrator, and Photoshop, as well as embedded in web projects.[21] Under its open-source license, EB Garamond is free for both personal and commercial applications within Adobe's ecosystem, ensuring seamless access for designers working in digital environments.[21] For direct downloads, the font files in OTF and TTF formats are hosted on GitHub at the repository octaviopardo/EBGaramond12, maintained by Octavio Pardo as a continuation of the project.[12] These files can be converted to WOFF2 format for optimized web performance, reducing bandwidth usage while maintaining compatibility with modern browsers. Best practices for web implementation include using the variable font version to minimize file sizes—one file replaces multiple static weights—resulting in faster page loads.[10] As of 2025, variable fonts like EB Garamond are supported in all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, with OpenType features such as ligatures rendering reliably for enhanced typographic control.[22][23]LaTeX and Desktop Integration
Theebgaramond package, available on CTAN, enables integration of EB Garamond in classic LaTeX workflows using pdfLaTeX by providing Type 1 fonts and configuring the New Font Selection Scheme (NFSS) for seamless document setup; users simply include \usepackage{ebgaramond} in the preamble to apply the font family across text elements.[13] This package ensures compatibility with traditional TeX engines while supporting features like old-style figures and ligatures through predefined font families such as EBGaramond-Regular and EBGaramond-Italic.[13]
For modern Unicode-aware engines like XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, EB Garamond is loaded directly via the fontspec package, allowing specification of OpenType features such as font variants and scaling with commands like \setmainfont{EBGaramond}; this approach leverages system-installed fonts without requiring additional Type 1 conversions.[13] Mathematical typesetting in these engines can incorporate EB Garamond through the unicode-math package paired with the EBGaramond-Maths font from the companion ebgaramond-maths package, which supplies essential math glyphs while relying on the base ebgaramond for setup.[17]
On desktop operating systems, EB Garamond—distributed as open-source OpenType and TrueType files—installs via native tools or font managers: Windows users add it through the Settings > Personalization > Fonts panel, macOS via Font Book by double-clicking the file, and Linux via package managers like apt install fonts-ebgaramond on Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu. Third-party font managers like FontBase (cross-platform) or GNOME Fonts (Linux) facilitate organization and previewing for professional workflows.
Following installation, EB Garamond appears in the font lists of applications including LibreOffice Writer for word processing, Scribus for desktop publishing, and Inkscape for vector graphics, where it supports precise typographic control in layouts and designs. As of 2025, TeX Live 2025 distributions incorporate updated ebgaramond packages that support the variable font version of EB Garamond, permitting dynamic adjustments to weight and optical size axes directly in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX via fontspec options like OpticalSize=12.[24]