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EB Garamond: A better class of open-source font

Georg Duffner’s EB Garamond, according to its official website, “is an open source project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century.”

It has true italics, true bold (more like semi-bold), true subscripts and superscripts, true swash caps and true small caps (including true capital ß – see Ralf Herrmann’s crystal-clear presentation on this). There are old style figures, discretionary ligatures, and work-in-progress initials. And in particular, there is coverage of the Unicode Latin Extended Additional codeblock.

This is not only actually all in a free font, but in one that looks pretty good, as the specimen [PDF] shows:

EB Garamond specimen, p.9
EB Garamond specimen: just... wow.

Although I haven’t given EB Garamond a full tryout yet, I can confirm that it works out of the box in XeTeX, which is probably the tool that can exploit its advantages to the fullest.

A caveat: EB Garamond is work in progress; Cyrillic italics, for example, are clearly provisional at the time of writing, and some outlines were updated as recently as a couple of weeks ago on github. Nonetheless, it will be good enough to set camera-ready copy for many projects as it stands; it is certainly miles ahead of the unspeakable G****** U****** and its ilk. Thankyou, Mr. Duffner.

Files

https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond/blob/master/otf/EBGaramond.otf?raw=true
https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/raw/master/OTF/EBGaramondItalic.otf
https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/blob/master/OTF/EBGaramondBold.otf

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Jonathan Silk

Jonathan Silk not only studies Mahāyāna Buddhism; he thinks about it as well. Is that unusual? Put it this way: I feel that I can recommend his work on that basis alone.

  • A number of Prof. Silk’s articles are available at the University of Leiden’s online repository.
  • For starters: timely thoughts on Buddhist studies in his Oratie, Lies, Slander and the Study of Buddhism, delivered April 1st, 2008 (but no laughing matter). Offering so much to discuss, I present just this excerpt:

    I would be a happy man had I a nickel — that’s a small denomination American coin – for every time I have been told that Buddhism is not a religion, but rather a philosophy, a way of life. This is more than a rhetorical strategy by which an interested Westerner allows himself to explore Buddhism without feeling an apostate for doing so. For it derives its validity only by denying Buddhist traditions their intrinsic identity, and Buddhists — traditional, Asian Buddhists — their autonomy. Once one denies that Buddhism is a religion, it ceases to be an integral part of anyone’s life. Buddhism becomes something optional, adventitious, incidental even to the people whose lives it structures. For Westerners disaffected with religion, this may be a happy solution. But at least for the scholar, it is an impossibility, for it constitutes a refusal to acknowledge the tradition in its multiplicity and complexity, or even in its most intrinsic nature. [2008:12]

  • Official Site: http://www.leidenuniv.nl/professoren/show_en.php3-medewerker_id=950.htm
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Weiler, ‘Neoclassical Newar Residences’ (2009)

Katharina Maria Lucia Weiler. ‘The Neoclassical Residences of the Newars in Nepal: Transcultural Flows in the Early 20th century Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley’. PhD diss., Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2009. [abstract / PDF (40 MB)]

Almost as good as being there, this lavishly illustrated dissertation treats an important architectural subculture of the Kathmandu Valley. Weiler looks closely at the stylistic origins of buildings built by people who wanted to emulate Europe, while remaining tantric Hindus and Buddhists at heart. This lucid description of a relatively recent strand in the rich tapestry of Newar urban life is commended to aficionados of Nepalese taste.

Nike of Samothrace and Śrī yantra at Ananda Niketan

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Manuscripts vanish from BNF

Some 30,000 books and manuscripts, including nearly 2,000 considered to be of “exceptional historical value”, have gone missing from the Bibliothèque Nationale, France.

The BNF contains important collections of Sanskrit manuscripts, including those gathered in Nepal and originally donated by Brian Houghton Hodgson. So much for the view that priceless South Asian artifacts, including manuscripts, are better off in European hands.


One of the BNF’s Buddhist MSS: the Udānavarga.

– Article: ‘Curator suspected of looting library’, The Guardian, June 28 2005.