Ysabeau, a sans-serif built on Garamond's skeleton

A Garamond skeleton stripped of serifs

Ysabeau is the work of a single designer, Christian Thalmann of Catharsis Fonts, and it was originally published under the name Eau de Garamond before being renamed. The stated aim is narrow and legible: keep the time-honored letterforms of the Garamond legacy but express them with the clean crispness of a low-contrast sans serif, so the result works for body copy as well as for display. That combination is the whole point of the project. A reader who likes Garamond's proportions and rhythm but finds the serifed texture heavy at small sizes is the intended user, and a reader who wants a neutral grotesque with no humanist touches at all is not.

The design history in the project README is unusually candid about method. Thalmann states that he did not use any specific font as a starting point or direct reference, and that he looked to Claude Garamont's legacy for inspiration. Most glyphs were drawn from scratch, with the source files of his earlier Garamond-flavored typeface used to save time on defining kerning classes and OpenType coding, and the free EB Garamond consulted when a specific character needed guidance on the Garamond solution. Consultants advised on the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek portions respectively. The result is a family with wide script coverage and a coherent hand, but a very small number of people behind it.

Three convenience cuts for engines that ignore OpenType

Alongside the default cut, the project publishes three spin-off fonts that exist for a narrow reason: environments with unreliable OpenType support. Rather than asking a user to switch features on, each spin-off promotes a specific set of features to its defaults.

The Office cut promotes SS02, LNUM and TNUM. The project README describes its effect in the line below.

* Office: Promotes the OpenType features SS02, LNUM, and TNUM to default. This suppresses the contextual use of long and superlong Q, turns the slanted hyphens horizontal, and replaces the old-style figures with tabular lining figures.

The Infant cut promotes SS01, loclBGR and LNUM, which activates single-storey designs for a and g, a script y, a tailed l, Bulgarian Cyrillic forms and proportional lining figures. The SC cut promotes SMCP so that small capitals appear without a feature switch. That is three separate ways of solving the same problem, so a project supporting only one environment has a defensible reason to pick one cut and ignore the rest.

The author is explicit that the spin-offs are meant for convenience rather than as the preferred form of the family. In professional settings, the stated recommendation is to use the base fonts and activate the desired OpenType features instead, which gives finer control over whether long Q, tabular or old-style figures, and alternate letterforms appear. If you accept the defaults of a spin-off, you are accepting a fixed set of trade-offs that the base family lets you decide per run of text.

Installing the TrueType files from the release ZIP

There is no package manager entry, no build step and no script to run for end users. Installation is a download and an unpack, and the project README states the procedure in one line.

If you wish to use the Ysabeau type family on your computer, simply download the "Ysabeau_Install" ZIP file from the [latest release][5], unpack it, and install the TrueType font files (.ttf) as appropriate for your operating system.

In practice that means fetching the Ysabeau_Install archive attached to the latest release, extracting it, and selecting the .ttf files you want for the regular, Office, Infant or SC cut, then installing them through the font manager of your operating system. Each platform treats that step differently, so the project cannot give you one command that works everywhere, and the archive layout determines which files belong to which family.

The other route is web use, and it is the weaker one today. The project states that the family will be obtainable from Google Fonts once it is finished, which means a hosted, cross-site delivery path is not available through that service at the time of writing. If you need the typeface on a website now, you are on your own for hosting and subsetting, and the README does not document a web-font workflow or a subsetting tool.

Glyphs sources in the repository, UFO only on request

The repository carries the working files, not just the built fonts, which is unusual for a type project of this size. The author says that all working files in Glyphs format are available from the repository, and that UFO versions of those files can be provided if you want to work in a different font editor, adding that he would not recommend that route himself.

That is a fair warning, and it shapes how far the repository is usable as a build system. The top level contains the familiar furniture of a type project: a fonts directory, a sources directory, a scripts directory, a build.sh file, a documentation directory, plus AUTHORS.txt, CONTRIBUTORS.txt, DESCRIPTION.en_us.html, FONTLOG.txt, OFL.txt and OFL-FAQ.txt. The build shell script is there for the author and for anyone willing to install Glyphs and the RMX Harmonizer plug-in, since Glyphs is commercial software that the author praises unreservedly but that costs money. Anyone expecting to clone the repository and compile fonts with open tooling will find that the tooling assumes a paid editor. The scripts directory is the place to look first for what automation exists, but the documentation does not describe a command-line build in any detail.

The SIL Open Font License and its three conditions

The family is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, and the README states the terms in a way that is easy to read as a lawyer-free summary. It gives the right to download, use and redistribute the fonts as you like, subject to three conditions: you retain the copyright notices, you do not redistribute the software without the license information, and you do not redistribute the fonts by themselves for a fee. Selling them as part of a bundle containing other items is allowed.

Those three points determine the commercial story. Embedding the fonts in a product, shipping them with an application, or offering a document as a service are all permitted by the grant as described. What is not permitted is the standalone sale of the font files themselves, so a business model that resells fonts directly is out of scope, while a design consultancy bundling the family with a template package is inside it. The repository also ships OFL.txt and OFL-FAQ.txt, the license text and its own question-and-answer companion, which are the documents to read before shipping anything commercially. This is a plain reading of the license terms as the project restates them, not legal advice, and the reserved font name provisions in the license text are the detail to check if you intend to modify the design.

How Ysabeau differs from the Garamond fonts it stands next to

The comparison the project itself makes is with the serif tradition it departs from. Claude Garamont's legacy is credited as the inspiration, EB Garamond by Georg Duffner was consulted for how specific characters should be solved, and Cormorant, the author's earlier Garamond-flavored family, served as the practical starting point for kerning classes and OpenType code. The difference in approach is therefore a matter of drawing: Ysabeau keeps the Garamond proportions and the humanist rhythm while removing the serifs and lowering the stroke contrast, so it can hold up in long passages of running text at screen sizes where a Garamond with full serifs tends to thin out.

Where EB Garamond or Cormorant answer a serif brief, Ysabeau answers a sans-serif brief with the same skeleton, which makes the choice a design decision rather than a quality decision. None of them is a drop-in substitute for the other, and switching between them changes the texture of a document rather than fixing a defect. A second, quieter alternative sits inside the family itself: the three spin-off cuts described earlier are the alternative to touching OpenType settings, and the base fonts are the alternative to accepting the spin-off defaults.

A release history with two entries and a June 2026 push

The version history is short. Two releases are recorded: v0.003 from 2019-01-06 and v2.006 from 2025-03-25, which suggests the family moved through private numbering before settling on the visible release line. The repository itself was pushed to last on 2026-06-23, so the working files and scripts have seen attention more recently than the last tagged release.

That gap matters for anyone planning an upgrade path. A push is not a release, so the changes sitting in the repository after 2025-03-25 are not something you can install as a font without building it yourself, and building it means accepting the paid-tool dependency described earlier. The upgrade cost for users is correspondingly low: when a new release appears, you download a fresh Ysabeau_Install ZIP and replace the installed .ttf files, with no configuration to migrate and no dependency to reconcile. The risk sits on the other side of that coin, with a single-designer family whose issue tracker is the stated channel for feedback and bug reports, and where a gap of several months between a tagged release and the next one would be unremarkable given the history so far.

Editorial conclusion

Ysabeau suits designers who want a humanist, Garamond-derived skeleton for body copy and display work and who are willing to install TrueType files by hand, and it suits developers who want a typeface they can bundle under the SIL Open Font License. It does not suit teams that need a web-ready hosted family today, because the project states that Google Fonts availability is still pending, and it does not suit teams expecting a variable font or a modern collaboration workflow. Before adopting, open the latest release ZIP, confirm that the .ttf files install on your target operating systems, and check the Google Fonts page to see whether hosting has caught up with the repository.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. CatharsisFonts/Ysabeau on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: OFL-1.1
4. README
5. Releases