Re: Font Question

>  > I've noticed that fonts don't render very well using italics(at least in
>>  WWW browsers they don't). This fact has also been confirmed by other
>>  members of HWG. I wondered: "Do some fonts render better as italic text
>  > than others?" Any suggestions?

This is more involved than it appears, and I have an explanation but 
no real answers. An italic face is not simply a sloped roman; and a 
roman face electronically manipulated to slope is not a proper sloped 
roman, far less is it an italic. The designs for all three, for they 
do have to be designed separately, are very different.

A genuine italic face will be 5-10% narrower than its roman 
counterpart if it has one, which ain't necessarily so. Electronically 
sloping a roman face will distort the weight of the vertical and 
sloped strokes while the horizontal strokes remain the same. 
Depending on which way the sloped strokes slope in the original they 
will either be made fatter or thinner when you 'italicize' them. A 
roman font which has been electronically sloped will  be at least as 
fat, and probably fatter, than the original. What you get is a mess.

Italic writing and print has a long history as an separate but equal, 
tribe to the roman; italic is not subservient to or simply a 
variation of, roman print. And a face doesn't have to be sloped at 
all to be an italic. Until the 19th century italic print was always 
placed on a separate line from roman print because its cursive nature 
gives it a lighter appearance and from the typographer's viewpoint 
this is still an excellent practice. If I need to emphasise in-line 
text I use something other than italic, print or web.

Jim's observations that the serifed faces Times New Roman, Garamond 
(some of the many) and New York 'italicize' better than most others 
tallies with my experience, but if you don't buy from a foundry you 
need to be lucky with what flavour of Times New Roman or Garamond or 
anything else that you get with your software. It's the poorly 
digitized free fonts (cheap copies) that produce the worst results, 
certainly in print. There are some horrors lurking out there, 
especially under the name of Herman Zapf's great Palatino. 
Ineffective copyright laws mean the buyer has no way of knowing 
whether the, eg, Gill Sans that comes with that DTP package is the 
Gill Sans that Eric Gill actually drew.

Would a colour change or switch between serif/sans or vice versa give 
you an acceptable result? Given the lottery of fonts on other 
people's computers, Elias's suggestion is still the best and is the 
one I'd follow.

Regards.

Freda

-- 
Never give up on what you know in your heart to be right. The world 
needs you and your commitment, desperately. - John Denver. 
http://www.thp.org

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