Garamond - thou art more lovely and more temperate

Submitted by kattekrab on Sat 25th Oct 2008 22:10

Garamond is a pretty font - especially the italic ampersandGaramond is a gorgeous font and one I have loved for a long long time.

It has a magnificent italic ampersand, and back in my mac days, I recall it having some lovely ornaments I was fond of using on the title pages of essays.

Pascal has posted on garamond.

An interesting read for closet typogeeks like me.

Is there a true free garamond (or jannon) out there? By free I mean free as in freedom.

The Open Font License 

As Andy Fitzsimon once said in a tutorial - the open source community doesn't give font development enough hate - there are not enough free fonts out there...  with truly free licenses. Fonts are hard work. Really hard work. So those that we do have are wonderful and fantabulous, and I am deeply deeply respectful and grateful to those who have made them, and set them free - but we need more. Kudos to redhat for giving us the liberation fonts.   I also have to mention Gentium - a typeface for all nations.

Free Fonts.
If this sounds like something you think might be important and what to know more...

Read this: http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html 

We have a free software tool called FontForge and raph levien's spiro stuff is very cool and currently experimental in dev versions of inkscape, and inkscape is working on SVG font foo...  but as a key element of design and printing... well we just need more fonts.

Brianna - I may just have stumbled on a talk idea for your mini-conf. 

 

Comments

someone (not verified)

Sun 26th Oct 2008 09:10

There is a URW Garamondian Garamond, ‘URW Garamond No8’ [1], amongst the URW font package which is licensed under the Aladdin Free Software Licence [2]. I am not aware of a free face based on Jannon’s cuts. Designing good, legible, accessible type design with a wide language support is indeed a sizable task, worth of a lot of praise—even adding pan-European support is a fair job in itself. I believe a good set of free typefaces should exist, and the palette doesn’t need to be large: two or three good serif and sanserif faces, and couple of good mono-spaced ones (and of course one of each with good hinting) easily suffice. With the Liberation, Bitstream Vera, and DejaVu set all of those bases are quite well covered and should suffice to most computer users. I would welcome any additional high quality free fonts but don’t personally have an issue with paying for typefaces. Thanks for the comments and linking. Looking forward to catching up at LCA over a coffee or a beer—oh, congrats on getting the Inkscape talk! (: 1. http://www.artifex.com/downloads/ 2. http://www.artifex.com/downloads/doc/Public.htm

ChristTrekker (not verified)

Thu 17th Nov 2011 08:11

EB Garamond, under SIL OFL.

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