EB Garamond
Georg Duffner, Octavio PardoSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Serif · Variable · 5 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Garamond alternatives
Claude Garamont cut the originals in Paris in the 1530s and 1540s, and almost every old-style text serif since is descended from them.
Why people look for a Garamond alternative
There is no single Garamond. The name covers a family of sixteenth-century designs and a dozen modern interpretations, most of them licensed separately, and two of them will not match each other. Somebody asked for a Garamond is being asked for a look rather than for a file, which is the one case where an open substitute is genuinely equivalent.
What a Garamond substitute has to get right
A small x-height, diagonal stress and a light colour on the page. Modern text serifs are drawn with large x-heights for screens, and one of those set as a Garamond looks nothing like the page it is meant to replace.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Garamond and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Bought from a foundry under a commercial licence
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Only as the licence you bought allows
- On a website
- Usually a separate web licence on top
Garamond
| Property | EB Garamond |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 |
| Variable | Yes |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese |
| Glyphs | 3,247 |
| Web font | 175 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Garamond?
- EB Garamond — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Garamond alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Garamond alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Garamond substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.