A part of the Egenolff–Berner specimen printed in 1592 showing the original cuts by Garamont and Granjon (the second type, mislabelled as "Petit Canon de Garamond")[1]
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 which refers to the fact that the letter forms are taken from the Egenolff–Berner specimen printed in 1592.
Implementation history
Illustration of the right (upper example) and the wrong (lower example) use of the optical sizes
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 schoolbookalternates.[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
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
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
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
Illustration of the short-tailed versus the long-tailed Q. The long-tailed Q is part of the Stylistic Set 6.
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
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
The prominent typeface designer Erik Spiekermann described the EB Garamond as "one of the best open source fonts".[8]
Availability
Web
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]
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 smartfont subsystem.
Through XeTeX
Nowadays LaTeX supports the three smartfont 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:
