The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Trajan Pro vs EB Garamond
A Roman inscription against a French Renaissance book face. Trajan Pro is Carol Twombly's 1989 Adobe Originals digitisation of the capitals carved into the base of Trajan's Column, an all-caps display face with no true lowercase. EB Garamond is Georg Duffner's open-source revival of Claude Garamont's roman and Robert Granjon's italic, drawn from the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen and built for running text.
Trajan Pro is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Cinzel, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Trajan Pro →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Trajan Pro is capitals only: the lowercase slots hold small caps, so it is built for titles, posters and credits rather than paragraphs.
- EB Garamond is a full old-style text family with roman and italic, small and petite caps, standard, discretionary and historical ligatures, swash italic capitals, and oldstyle figures.
- Trajan's letterforms are incised, brush-then-chisel Roman capitals with sharp flared serifs; EB Garamond's are Garalde forms cut for metal type, with a low x-height and a gently angled stress.
- Trajan Pro 3, Robert Slimbach's 2012 revision, grew the family to six weights plus Greek and Cyrillic; EB Garamond on Google Fonts ships as two variable files (roman and italic) spanning weights 400 to 800, with Greek and Cyrillic included.
- Trajan is commercial: it comes with an Adobe Fonts subscription or a perpetual licence sold through Fontspring, while EB Garamond is free under the SIL Open Font License for any use, including self-hosting and app embedding.
Trajan Pro
Reach for Trajan Pro when you need a single line of monumental capitals, such as a film title, a book jacket, a wine label or a building sign, and the licence fee is a rounding error on the job.
EB Garamond
Reach for EB Garamond for anything with real text in it, from long-form articles and books to editorial sites, where you want a classic Garamond with a true italic and no licensing cost.