The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Minion Pro vs EB Garamond
Two old-style serifs with Renaissance roots, aimed at the same job: long, comfortable reading. Minion Pro is Robert Slimbach's 1990 Adobe Original, a polished synthesis of late-Renaissance models, while EB Garamond is Georg Duffner's open-source revival of specific Garamont and Granjon types from the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen.
Minion Pro is a commercial font, so it is shown here in EB Garamond, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Minion Pro →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Minion Pro ships in four optical sizes (Caption, Regular, Subhead, Display), two widths, and four weights with italics, giving you purpose-cut masters for everything from footnotes to headlines.
- EB Garamond on Google Fonts, extended by Octavio Pardo, comes in five weights from Regular to Extra-Bold with italics and a variable font, but no optical sizes in the Google release.
- Minion is a designer's synthesis rather than a revival, so its forms are smoother and more regular; EB Garamond stays closer to the 16th-century printed originals, with more visible historical character and a sharper italic descended from Granjon.
- EB Garamond covers Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic under the SIL Open Font License, free for any use, while Minion Pro is commercial: it comes with an Adobe Fonts subscription, and self-hosting or app embedding requires a separate Adobe license.
Minion Pro
Reach for Minion Pro when you are setting a book or long-form print project and want optical sizes and a neutral, highly refined classic that disappears into the text.
EB Garamond
Reach for EB Garamond when you want authentic Garamond flavour with no licensing cost, for web body text, editorial sites, or self-hosted and open-source projects.