Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Garamond" in English language version.
Some of my British colleagues who worked with the original version of [Monotype] Garamond consider the digitised version much too light. It doesn't feel so to me.
I made no attempt to eliminate the mannerisms or deficiencies of his famous type, realising that they came not by intention, but rather through the punch-cutter's handling, to his lack of tools of precision and his crude materials, for he worked by eye and not by rule.
I did find it impossible to eliminate, in my own rendition of the letter, that subtle something we call 'personality' that something made up of items so intangible as practically to be imperceptible when individual types are compared, yet clearly manifest when the page they form is viewed as a whole. The subtleties ... I couldn't neglect, yet I did not consciously include them in my own drawings, and these are the touches that mark my face as belonging to the present and not to the sixteenth century.
This issue of Monotype is set in a trial font of a new version of Garamond's design ... the type ornaments, modelled on 16th century ones, will also be available.
Most of these sixteenth-century types were originally cut without the letters J, U, and W, which were added in the seventeenth century.
For the use of EB Garamond on the web Google webfonts provides an easy way to embed the font via @font-face. There you can also download a ttf version of the font. Sadly, that version is utterly outdated.
[Quoting a letter from James Mosley]: Leading of text matter for aesthetic reasons is largely an 18th-century (and later) habit...My observations of printing in earlier centuries suggests that the founders generally cast types to fit the body very tightly, and that printers used them without leading.
Garamond Premier Pro had its genesis in 1988, when Adobe senior type designer Robert Slimbach visited the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, to study their collection of Claude Garamond's metal punches and type designs ... While fine-tuning Adobe Garamond as a useful design suited to modern publishing, Slimbach started planning an entirely new interpretation of Garamond's designs based on the range of unique sizes he'd seen at the Plantin-Moretus, and on comparable italics cut by Garamond's contemporary, Robert Granjon.
Robert does acknowledge a major outside influence on his new Garamond ... an optical size experiment Stephen Harvard put together in 1989 ... with a lower-case Garamond "a" interpolating from a small size to a display size. Rob thought this was very interesting. But the temporal and technical constraints Rob was working with made it impractical to do anything with this idea at the time.
Robert does acknowledge a major outside influence on his new Garamond ... an optical size experiment Stephen Harvard put together in 1989 ... with a lower-case Garamond "a" interpolating from a small size to a display size. Rob thought this was very interesting. But the temporal and technical constraints Rob was working with made it impractical to do anything with this idea at the time.