Author: Georg A. Duffner

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# EB Garamond

Claude Garamont’s designs go open source

Garamont’s fonts represent a milestone in the history of type design, a touchstone to which font designers have been returning ever since. EB Garamond is an open source project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century. Its design reproduces the original by Claude Garamont: The source for the letterforms is a scan of a specimen known as the “Berner specimen”, which, composed in 1592 by Conrad Berner, son-in-law of Christian Egenolff and his successor at the Egenolff print office, shows Garamont’s roman and Granjon’s italic fonts at different sizes. Hence the name of this project: Egenolff-Berner Garamond.

## Why another Garamond?

The Garamonds are probably the most copied typefaces in the world. There are indeed lots of excellent Garamond fonts, also such that try to approach the original in the same way as EB Garamond does. In the world of free software, however, only a few Garamond-inspired fonts exist, and as far as I know, none with the scope of EB Garamond. I know that competition is tough in this field, and these fonts won’t be able to stand up to their commercial counterparts for quite some time. Nevertheless, it’s time for the opensource community to have a classical Garamond and I promise, i’ll try hard to learn and give my best.

## The License

EB Garamond is free software under the terms of the SIL Open Fonts License (ofl). That means, you are entitled to do what you want to with these fonts, as long as you

- retain the ofl notice, even if you distribute it in a modified form
- don’t sell them on their own
- don’t claim they were your work.

## Thanks

- Raph Levien for the scans of the specimen
- Rogério Brito and Khaled Hosny for planting this idea in my head and Khaled especially for all his programming wizardry
- George Williams for FontForge and all those who are helping to make it such a great tool
- Dave Crossland from Googlefonts
- Alexei and Gayaneh from Cyreal for their help on the cyrillic
- Raphaël Pinson for his valuable input
- Guillaume Vauthier for letting me use his fonts for my work and for his help with medieval characters
- Tim Larson and Nikolaus Maxweiler who directly contribute their work to EB Garamond
- Finlay McCourt for proofreading this page.
- Fr. Jérôme for translating this page into french
- All those type lovers who are helping with their critique to make this a better font

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© Georg Duffner