AFAIK Adobe Garamond has never been released for free, though it is bundled with a variety of Adobe applications.

André

As an aside, the definitive Garamond by
Adobe is their Garamond Premier Pro.

http://typophile.com/node/12216
http://typophile.com/node/49102

hhp

About the Ads: It seems that Fonts.com has an agressive marketing campaign, so as to appear with anything having to do with fonts (a Google AdWords kind of technique I assume). So they also appear on illegal sites like the ones you stumbled upon. Free download sites are to be suspected, so one always has to double check if what they claim is legit. Also check the license (EULA) which will also tell ou something. Anyway: Ads don't legitimize sites in any way, as the mostly operate seperately from the content of the site.

OK. Sigh.

Thanks folks.

Free alternatives are:

URW Garamond No8 (Stempel Garamond): https://github.com/rbrito/urw-garamond/tree/master/orig/ttf
This one is can be used without concern, the quality is quite alright, it is an older digitalization of Stempel Garamond which is now free. However in this version the small caps are actually petite caps and the old style figures have way too much distance between the figures, at least in the software I use. If you use it with lining figures and normal capitals for abbreviations it will serve your well.

EB Garamond is an ambitions project as it aims to be true to the original Garamond. It is currently in development and the status is beta or alpha even for bold and italics.
Regular: https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond/tree/master/otf
Italics and Bold: https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/tree/master/OTF

So tradeoffs everywhere... The Adobe Garamond isn't that expensive for a font.

Btw, if you are a writer, normally all you need are regular and italic style (which include smallcaps etc). IIRC, the license fee for individual styles is pretty modest at the Adobe site, especially if you're in the US, so that you can have a proper license for the equivalent of a good book. The real question is if you really need it for what you do.

A lot of the functionality you will get out of an OpenType (Pro) font depends on the layout application you’re using.
http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/opentype_feature_support

>Thought the site was legitimate because it included ads for legit sites selling fonts (e.g. fonts.com).

Fox News runs ads for legitimate businesses too. :-)

Many thanks to everyone for the helpful info. Very much appreciated.

Want, not need. Must spend free pennies on actual books. :-)

Should have known better about the ads. I've seen weirder ad placement than that.

I had URW Garamond installed. For some reason it doesn't excite me, but I may learn to appreciate it more. (Glad to learn it's Stempel Garamond--didn't know that.)

I didn't know about EB Garamond. Just went and got it. It feels very nice. Makes me happy. Thank you.

What does alpha mean for a typeface? Spacing might be poor? Uneven color? Characters have other design flaws? Or worse--tops of characters get cut off or something horrible like that? I'm just learning to see details of typefaces. I'm sure that most of it passes me by, except unconsciously, presumably.

URW Garamond isn't Stempel Garamond unless it's followed by No.2 or No.8.

André

Alpha – Early design/test phase.
Beta – Late design/test phase.

See also http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/beta.html.

Thanks T.R.-

I know what alpha vs. beta vs. 1.0 vs. the rest mean in the context of general software development, testing, and use. I've experienced all of them both as a programmer and as a user. (1.0: "It's beta, but we have cash flow problems." :-)

I don't know what's implied by these terms for a digital typeface. If EB Garamond were still in an alpha state for its roman fonts, would that mean "Don't complain to us if it crashes your typesetting/wordprocessing/whatever program, and there's a good chance it will", or "It's supposed to look like original Garamond, but only some of the characters are close", or "might look fine at 12 pts but could look wacky at 36 pts--and again, don't complain to us"? I'm a novice in this world, so I don't have a sense of what sorts of things count as showstoppers, and what sorts of things count as annoyances which one can choose to work around. I've noticed no problems or things that bother me so far using EB Garamond's roman, italic, and bold at text sizes with XeLaTeX. I've learned to notice certain things about fonts in recent months, but I'm sure that miss a lot. Maybe for a designer there can be glaring problems with a typeface that make "alpha" the appropriate term, while I just blithely abuse readers by giving them documents in the same typeface.

(Yes, URW Garamond No. 8 is the one I haven't found moving--thanks for clarification Andre.)

Did a little poking around, as I should have earlier. These pages help me understand the meaning of alpha and beta for typefaces, EB Garamond in particular, even though the terms aren't mentioned:

http://typophile.com/node/79713
http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/design.html

Seems to satisfy my needs at this point.
Or rather, wants.

@sii

>Fox News runs ads for legitimate businesses too. :-)

Very dry, but not unnoticed. LOL!

For a font or face in alpha, expect roughness of all kinds; hinting/kerning, if any, somewhat short of exact; not all glyphs there yet; glyphs reshaped, sometimes drastically, as time passes. This sort of thing. Very similar to programs, in fact.

In beta, a face would be mostly finished but in need of tuning. You may get some odd OpenType substitutions, including none. A beta test needs a lot of pathological test cases to weed out the bogosity. Again, just like programs. Do your French and German quotes sit right where they should? What happens if you turn on historical ligatures within small-caps within swashes?

If you haven't fried your eyes on garaldes yet, there are also Junicode and Bhikkhu Pesala's Guru.

Thanks Té. That's exactly what I wanted re alpha/beta.

Yes, more Garaldes, please! :-) Will check those out.

Thanks agisaak for clarifying this! The linked URW Garamond is indeed a No. 8 version.