What is your opinion on Monotype Garamond (which is installed with Microsoft Office)? It began to grow on me. I think it looks more 'authentic' than the popular Adobe Garamond. Of course they are completely different, but still.
Typophile
Garamond (Monotype/Microsoft)
What do you mean by "Authentic". One is not better - just different.
What do you mean by "Authentic". One is not better - just different.
Difficult to explain but it looks more '16th century' to me...
Oops, my bad. Thank you.
¶ A word to the wise, avoid the fonts that are installed in an OS.
¶ Garamond-wise, I only liked and used:
•••Gunter Lange's 1972 Garamond (Berthold)
•••Robert Slimbach's 1989 and 2005 Garamond (Adobe)
This is an interesting point. It's very light, which gives it an air of refinement on first glance. But this is no sign of quality - it's a distortion. Fonts intended for body text are quite thick for a reason. Monotype's digitisation just doesn't have the feel of a book printed in metal type. Compare it to a book printed in any point up to the 1960s and you'll see it doesn't have the warmth and colour and clarity of print. At display sizes it might be nice, but a book in it would look spindly and weird.
More practically (and previous discussions haven't noted this), it's technically outdated, a product from 1995 that belongs there. No bold italic. No automatic ligature substitution. No small caps. No optical sizes.
What I will note is that it's a very compact font file (as might be expected given its 90s origins), which makes pdf files created with it smaller. I once had a pdf document that was 900kb with EB Garamond condense to something like 100 when I switched to Monotype so the email would send faster. But this is not normally a big problem.
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