Loch Garman is based on Baoithín, designed by Viktor Hammer and Colm Ó Lochlainn; Baoithín was based on Hammerschrift, which was related to Hammerschrift American Uncial -- though Loch Garman is more authentic Gaelic font than American Uncial.

Loch Garman was first digitized in 1999 by Michael Everson and originally used the MacGaelic character set on the Macintosh platform, and ISO/IEC 8859-14 on the PC. In 2010 Loch Garman version 3 was released in OpenType format, completely compliant with Unicode encoding and with an extended character set.