I released book 2 in my middle grade book series for SOMNIUM back in November of 2021 on Amazon. I’ve been a bit slow in getting it posted up on IngramSpark and finally got around to doing it this past weekend. To my surprise, although the Garamond font is available in Pages, it is no longer available in Affinity Designer when I went to export my book in pdf format. I looked in my FontBook and realized there is no Garamond font listed there, so I’m not even quite sure how it’s available in Pages aside from it being part of the operating system.
My Google searches didn’t come up with any concrete answers as to why it’s no longer available in other applications. Sadly, without being able to open my book properly in Affinity Designer I was out of luck for properly creating the pdf for upload (or else come up with a different way to create the pdf).
The best solution I could come up with was to replace the Garamond font with something that I could add to my FontBook. During my research I discovered that Apple’s Garamond was based on ITC Garamond. While I found a downloadable version of this font, it required a license. I was hesitant to invest in a font that I wasn’t sure would properly match so I decided to try out Google’s free version of EB Garamond.
For the most part EB Garamond was a decent substitute. When replacing the font I discovered that it increased my page count by about 10 pages. Since I already had my covers created I didn’t want to have to recreate them due to a difference in the book length (and therefore spine width) so I made the following modifications to the text in Pages:
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My original line spacing was set at 1.4. I updated this to 1.2.
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I decreased the character spacing by -2%
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With these 2 changes I ended up with a few less pages, which allowed me to add some blank pages and keep my overall book length the same. Not ideal, but it worked.
A few things to watch out for:
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For some reason IngramSpark rendered the font slightly differently, particularly as it pertains to an italic “e” at the end of a word. I didn’t investigate why this happened as it doesn’t bother me all that much, but it is odd.
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Remember if you’ve used other fonts in your text. I had also used a handwriting font within my text and completely overlooked it when I selected all of my text and replaced it with EB Garamond. It’s something I’ll have to go back and fix.
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This won’t layout exactly the same as Garamond, so be sure to look through all of your text to make sure you are satisfied. For example, I found that the updated font caused some unexpected wrapping that will need to be addressed since I don’t like how it looks.