Stempel Garamond

Stempel Garamond was first issued by the Stempel foundry almost a hundred years ago as Garamond-Antiqua. It was—and remains—one of the more faithful and attractive revivals of the Garamond typefaces. There have been a number of versions since, clones, reissues, digitalizations. One of the better known would be the free URW++ Garmond No.8, which may be found readily online. It is ‘almost’ an open license font; a publisher needn’t worry about using it for print or embedding it in a PDF. I see it pretty much as a publisher’s starting kit, dependable and usable for pretty much any project.

Incidentally, its italics are based on ones actually designed by Claude Garamond, where many other Garamond typefaces use italics by Robert Granjon, a respected successor of Garamond.

The Garamond Original typeface—a name used by both Bitstream and SoftMaker—is essentially a clone of Stempel. As with Garamond No.8, they lack opentype features for those who want or need them, though SoftMaker does offer separate small caps. That makes up for much. The typeface is included in SoftMaker’s MegaFont collection, which remains a rather good deal.

Not surprisingly, various opentype projects based on Garamond No.8 have popped up over the last couple decades but none have seemed to go much of anywhere. Be that as it may, the versions that are available are quite viable alternatives to commercial Garamonds or the popular EB Garamond and other open license Garamond (or Garamond-like) fonts. Stempel Garamond, under whatever name, is a good choice for anyone producing books.

We have used versions in all Stephen Brooke’s fantasy novels set among the Mora (the Malvern Trilogy, the Mora Trilogy, etc). We are entirely likely to use Stempel again in books to come. Indeed, we consider it our default for novels.

Dihjauti

When we first published Stephen Brooke’s trilogy of Cully Beach mystery novels, we used Bitstream’s Transitional 521 as the text typeface. We sorta-kinda were licensed to use it; a large Bitstream catalog came bundled with our Corel software (which we still use). The licensing, however, was admittedly a bit vague about how the fonts could be used commercially. POD and desktop publishing were not on much of anyone's radar at the time.

We decided a while back, therefor, to no longer work with their fonts. Not that anyone was ever likely to complain but we are now using open source/open license typefaces where practical, and type from the Softmaker catalog (for which we are fully licensed) when necessary. Transitional 521 was Bitstream’s clone of Electra. A lovely typeface, by the way, so when we decided to replace it we wanted something with a similar vibe to it. What we ended up with was Dihjauti by T. Christopher White, a free font issued under the SIL license.

It looks good in print, at least as body text, and we are satisfied with it in the newer editions of the Cully Beach books. That does not mean we would use it if the series ever expands beyond the original trilogy. We might wish to differentiate any new books and there are plenty of other good choices. Dihjauti is readily available online from the various free font sites.

Revamped Blog

After some thirteen years of publishing this AP blog in Courier New, we have revamped it with new typefaces. There's really no reason to use the old web-safe fonts; indeed, in these days of mobile devices, they are no longer ubiquitous and may even slow down page-loading. Plus, Courier New is not a particularly attractive typeface nor could we find anything similar we care for.

Therefor, a completely different direction but still with a businesslike (one might even say industrial) appearance, utilizing Oswald and Vollkorn. Maybe we'll stick with them for another thirteen years!

Libertine

The open license Linux Libertine typeface is sometimes touted as a Times New Roman replacement, though the two do not look particularly similar. Libertine is more in the style of such mid-20th Century neoclassical designs as Berling and Palatino.

But it is metrically equivalent to Times. That is, the same words in either typeface should take up about the same amount of space on a page. This means Libertine, as Times, is somewhat closely spaced, though it does not tend to look as cramped in long lines of text. We might compare it more to Adobe’s Minion, which is similarly economically spaced (and resembles more than a bit).

It may be noted that other typefaces also are equivalent to Times New Roman. That was a common goal in the early days of free typefaces, when TNR was ubiquitous both on and off line. The popular Gentium is one of the most successful of these, though it has more of a Goudy-like appearance (to us, anyway).

Is Libertine a decent typeface? Would we use it as book text? The answer must be a definite ‘maybe.’ One can pick at little details of the design but overall we feel it works pretty well. Definitely as well as many commercial fonts available. But, as Palatino, we might be inclined to reserve it for jobs other than novels. Poetry, perhaps—we have employed Gentium effectively for collections, making sure to keep it relatively large and well spaced. These are type faces that need room to breathe, that might look crowded on the page of a typical novel. Or, as with Minion (or even Times), Libertine could be effective in books or magazines with the text laid out in double columns, on wider pages.

This does not mean we would never use it a body text in a novel. We tested replacing the Berling we used in a couple novels with Linux Libertine and it fitted rather well. Yes, and it looked pretty good, too. So perhaps a future novel from Arachis Press will appear set in Libertine; we do intend to move to open license type, after all, and this one should give us no surprises. It can be one of those workmanlike choices we should all have available as a fall-back choice.

And we would be willing to recommend it as a choice for someone new to setting up a novel (or other book). It will work—and it’s way better than Times!

Humanist Slab-Serifs

The Mid-Twentieth Century saw the emergence of what are sometimes called (accurately enough) ‘humanist slab-serif’ typefaces. These retained—for the most part—the rectangular serifs of earlier slab fonts but varied the axis and the other strokes to create a more humanist feel to the forms, as with the humanist sans faces that were appearing in the same period. One seemingly simple yet elegant example is Candida, which received greater recognition when Bitstream reissued it half a century later.

Around the same time, the company released a somewhat similar humanist slab of their own design, Prima. At first glance, they seem quite alike but one begins to pick out the differences quickly enough. Prima is rather unlovely beside Candida, but the latter undoubtedly influenced (or inspired) its design. It may be noted that Prima, as Adobe’s Utopia and Bitstream’s own Charter, was designed to work well with the low resolution printers of its time.

A second look will tell us Prima is pretty much identical to Bitstream’s Vera Serif, which has since developed into Deja Vu, a popular and widespread free font. Why the name change? In part, we would assume, to mark it as their open license (more or less) offering. An entire family of different fonts was attached to both Prima and Vera, sans and mono versions, designed with the same uses in mind. Deja Vu Serif is certainly a decent enough font, and beloved of the open source community, but we would be unlikely to use it to print a book.

Candida, maybe, but we’d have to pay for a license! In honesty, it’s not the sort of typeface we’d normally consider for a novel. Perhaps for some niche project it would be just the thing. There are, to be sure, other nice-looking humanist slab-serif typefaces available, and some are even open license. It has again become a rather popular concept and more than one recent release, such as IBM’s big family of typefaces, has reflected the trend. By the way, we think IBM Plex Serif is decidedly ugly (a pastiche of varying styles). We’d take Deja Vu over it, any day—it, at least, stays true to its concept.

Kameron, by Vernon Adams, looks pretty decent and is available from Google Fonts. Its lack of a separate italic is, however, problematic, and it is perhaps not really suitable to book text. To be sure, there are also a number of faces that almost fit the classification but are not quite humanist or not quite true slabs. There is not a big gap between humanist slab-serifs and some neoclassical fonts. As always, how they look on the page is more important than what category we place them in.

 

Megafont Review

Softmaker, a software company from Germany, has been selling digital fonts for quite a long time. We recently purchased their Megafont package, some 7500 fonts with a commercial license, for thirty-five US dollars. This seems like a pretty good deal for a small publisher; we can print books with them without any restriction (other than the number of computers on which they may be installed). So—are they as good a buy as they seem?

The first thing to note is that of those thousands of fonts, more than a third are ‘special effects’ versions of the other fonts: outlined, antiqued, etc. These would prove somewhat useless to most of us and we would be unlikely to ever install most of them. Yes, I could possibly see using one in the main titling of a book or something of that sort.

The ‘normal’ fonts are of three sorts, some licensed or reissued from older (often out-of-business) foundries, some outright clones of older type (and not always done that well), and a few original fonts created for Softmaker. It should be noted that the quality of the fonts has improved since Softmaker (and others) started issuing digital type, decades ago. It should also be noted that the big-name foundries (many of which have been bought up by Monotype now) were not always that good either with their digital fonts.

I can not complain about the quality of the typefaces in the package (aside from the aforementioned special effects variants). Most are usable enough, though some lack italics or weights we might want. It is not always easy to tell what other typeface they might mimic, either—what is included might or might not provide a desired replacement font. They tend to be heavy on older and somewhat old-fashioned fonts, from the late Nineteenth–early Twentieth Century period. Many would not be a first (nor even second) choice for publishing modern fiction (though they could work, if nothing else were available).

I will say right here that one could publish quite decent books with nothing but open license typefaces, such as the ones available on Google Fonts. Many of those are geared toward online use rather than print but others are perfectly usable. EB Garamond, Alegreya, Crimson Pro—I would not hesitate to use one of those in a print book. The venerable Charter and Utopia are good too. I could keep listing useful fonts, but back to the Megafont package.

Some fonts from Softmaker have already proven of use. We have redesigned the novel ‘The Crocodile God’ (a fantasy adventure by Stephen Brooke) with their Gareth, a stand-in for Galliard, and it looks just fine. We may revise other books from time to time, though there is no great hurry about it. New books are entirely likely to use open license type, but it is nice to have something to plug into revisions or new additions to a series. The Softmaker package is, if nothing else, security, a back up source of typefaces. The $35 is a fairly good deal really; one could spend that much for a single commercial font.

To be sure, this typeface collection includes many that would be of more use to a designer than a publisher. After all, we do need to design ads and book covers and such, too, so they may well prove useful. Whether I would recommend it to a graphic designer, I’m not so sure. Oh, at that price, why not?

But for the everyday user, maybe not. This is an investment—albeit a small one—in commercial typefaces. For personal use, one would do as well to stick to what is available free. There are more good choices every day!

The Free Font Ground-Breakers

Loads of free typefaces flooded the internet pretty much as soon as there was an internet. Many of them were pretty awful, perhaps having some use as display fonts but definitely not suited for use as print text. We’re talking original typefaces here, not clones or copies of older designs (though they certainly could be inspired by them). We’ll write of five serif body-text faces from those early days that were good enough to have survived and flourished.

The first is Deja Vu, the darling of open license fans everywhere, and common in the Linux world. This font has undergone various iterations and redesigns since a form of it first appeared as Bitstream’s Prima, later morphing into Vera and the Deja Vu most commonly distributed today. As some of its successful contemporaries, it was designed to work well with low resolution screens and printers, having simplified forms. Deja Vu is essentially in the humanist slab-serif style, with similarities to such older typefaces as Candida. There have been plenty enough new fonts (many free) of this sort released since but they are not necessarily any better. Not that Deja Vu is a particularly attractive font—we doubt we would print a novel in it. Possibly it could be useful for nonfiction or brochures or that sort of thing; it is readable at quite small sizes.

Bitstream released another font into the wild, intended for much the same roles: Matthew Carter’s Charter. This one draws from the Fournier designs of the Eighteenth Century (as does the somewhat more recent and similar Adobe Source Serif) but simplifies them into a sturdy and attractive font suited to the needs of the time. As computers and printers improved, those needs lessened but Charter remains a quite good and quite free typeface. We would have no qualms about printing a fiction book in Charter (or nonfiction, for that matter), though there are more ‘elegant’ choices. It is a do-it-all font.

As is Adobe’s Utopia, which was designed with much the same roles in mind. Utopia has something of a slab-serif look to it but also draws from ‘Transitional’ and ‘Modern’ typefaces such as Baskerville. It is another all-purpose font. Adobe intended it as a Times alternative, for office use; although it never caught on for that role it remains a quite good typeface. We have issued fiction books set in Utopia. It provides a balance of modern utility and classic elegance. Were we forced to use one font for everything, it might well be our choice. Utopia became free, apparently, somewhat by accident. Be that as it may, it is definitely free to use as we will these days.

Our final two, Gentium and Linux Libertine, were not designed with the shortcomings of early computing in mind, but as traditional typefaces from their origin. Both are frequently referred to as Times replacements, and compared to that font, but we do not find either particularly similar to the Times typeface. Oh, some, to be sure; any serif text face is bound to have similarities or it would become unreadable!

Gentium does share one quality with Times and that is that it is somewhat closely spaced. That is the big problem with Times; it was designed for use in narrow newspaper columns and can become too dense on a book-width page (not to mention a sheet of typewriter paper). Gentium isn’t quite so tightly packed but it is something of which one should be aware. We have used it for poetry books but not for novels. This is not to say we never would. To us, Gentium has a bit of a Goudy-esque feel, with definite calligraphic elements. It is a nice looking but not ostentatious font, workman-like and most certainly usable.

Libertine draws somewhat from the mid-Twentieth Century neo-humanist movement that gave us such typefaces as Palatino and Berling. Although it has never caught on to any great extent as a book font, it may be found in use all over the internet. Wikipedia is the most obvious example. That familiarity could admittedly be a strike against using it for print. We have not used it for a book yet, but intend to in upcoming releases (as a replacement for the above-mentioned Berling). Libertine has the bonus of a true matching sans, Linux Biolinum (Deja Vu Sans has no family resemblance to Deja Vu Serif).

These five have been around for over thirty years, plenty enough time to be thoroughly tested. We would have no reservations about their dependability; whether they have the appearance one desires is another question and one that must be answered on an individual, book-by-book basis. But they will get the job done; they will not let one down.

Garamond

Garamond—yes, the typeface for your fiction book. You’re always safe using some version of Garamond to print that novel or short story collection.

Well, maybe not every version. I would advise against using the one that comes installed with Windows for two reasons. One, it is an ‘American’ Garamond, on the spiky and aggressive side, and based on the designs of Jannon rather than Garamond himself. Two, you do not actually own the rights to use it in a print book. Not that anyone is going to come after you if you send a book set in it off to a print-on-demand company, but you should recognize that you really are supposed to pay for a license to use it.

The same, of course, is true of today’s industry standard, Adobe Garamond. If you intend to pay for a typeface, you might as well go with the Adobe. It’s pretty authentic to the original fonts with just the right bit of modernization.

If you would prefer a free alternative, go for EB Garamond. It is practically identical to Adobe’s version, being based on the same original samples, and may be downloaded free. I would suggest the EB Garamond 12 that was the original version, not the EB Garamond that has recently shown up on Google Fonts; that newer take on the typeface has some changes that may make it better for online use but not so good for print. Not that it couldn’t be used, to be sure. One gives up small caps and old style numerals for more weights—most unneeded—and lining figures.

Before Adobe’s offering came along, perhaps the most authentic Garamond was that from the Stempel foundry—and its many clones. The URW++ version is totally free and open license, having been donated to the Ghostscript project decades ago. I’ve used it for several novels, more than any other typeface, I suspect (and I’m not going to stop and count right now). It looks good, it looks professional. It and the EB are the two top choices for free Garamonds.

Yet I shall mention another: Cormorant or, more precisely, Cormorant Garamond, the latter being a slightly altered version to make it a little more suited to body text. Incidentally, I would recommend the ‘book’ weight, not the regular, which looks a bit spindly. Cormorant, on the whole, veers closer to that American style of Garamond mentioned earlier. It is actually a quite attractive typeface, but perhaps not as readable for long stretches of text.

I shall also mention a couple free Garamond-adjacent typefaces, both of which tend toward the Granjon style (Granjon being one of Garamond’s assistants and successors). Excellent commercial fonts have been created in that Granjon mode, notably Plantin and Matthew Carter’s Galliard.

Plantin is a solid, workmanlike face that has been dependable for book text for a century. A pretty good replacement for it is Crimson. Do make sure you get the latest iteration of the design, Crimson Pro. It has finally made it to the totally professional level with this version. Crimson is one of those typefaces I could see using for pretty much anything but it may not have quite the sense of elegance one gets from Adobe or EB Garamond.

Alegreya is elegant, and makes a decent alternative to Galliard. It seems definitely inspired by Carter’s design; not a clone by any means but very much with the same light-hearted and adventurous feel. This is particularly evident in the italics. I do love Galliard but I think Alegreya may just replace it.

I mentioned the added weights in the newest version of EB Garamond. I find all those bolds and blacks and so on largely pointless, and generally not all that attractive (and bold italics can be an abomination). Good italics are more important—essential even—than a variety of weights, and I really prefer to have small caps available too. EB Garamond 12, Cormorant, and Alegreya do all include small caps.

Alegreya and Cormorant also have another point in their favor, and that is a matching sans typeface. I’ll readily admit I like Ysabeau, the sans companion to Cormorant, more than Cormorant itself. It and Alegreya Sans can both be useful for titling in a book set in any flavor of Garamond.

So, we have no excuse for not using Garamond in our next novel. Unless, of course, we prefer Caslon. I’ll have to talk about that some other time.