A lot of scripts are classified as regular typestyles, but have an italic angle. Calculate caret rise and run doesn’t work unless one temporarily changes the typestyle to italic.
To me it seems preferable to have script fonts with a slanting cursor, even if they are not classified as italic. Is there any reason why the caret run is not calculated for non-italic fonts even if they have an italic angle set on the Post tab? Actually, the caret run is calculated, but the angle is assumed to be zero if the font is not italic.
Is there a greater purpose for the font subfamily name (regular, italic, etc.)?
Regular can become Regular, Book, Roman, Normal or not be there at all. It seems Italic and Bold sometimes are attached to the font name. Sometimes the font name concatenates this designation into one long digits stream.
How come there’s only 4? Do the other alternatives mean nothing: Xlight, Light, Medium, Demibold, Extrabold, Heavy, Black, Condensed, Extended, Hollow, Shadowed, Outline, Oblique, ETC?
Is there a rule or convention that should be used because other software demands it? For example, I’ve understand that if Panose (thanks Dave) doesn’t specify monospaced the font is not treated as such (on MS Word?).
AFAIK monospaced is determined by the Fixed Pitch value on the Post tab. Although you can create many different font styles, most word processors have only two buttons (italic and bold) to select the font style. I’m positive this will change in the next Window version.
All right so it wasn’t Dave, but Microsoft’s “The Font Validator” … You are probably right it’s the Post Fixed Pitch value and not Panose, because we all know about “Panose”…
However, on a fixed width font:
When I turned on the Post Fixed Pitch but not Panose Proportion, Font Validator said “E2303 The isFixedPitch field != 0, (where “!=” must mean not equal) but the OS/2 panose bProportion is not monospace”
When I turned off Post Fixed Pitch, I got: “E2304 The isFixedPitch field is zero, but htmx shows the font is fixed pitch” And if Panose was monospace then got this additional message: “E2305 The isFixedPitch field is zero, but the OS/2 panose bProportion is monospace”.
So, Font Validator checks for consistency between the Post Fixed Pitch and the Panose Proportion (the 4th one)… And compares these to the variable-ness of the font (htmx table). Wonder which value tells other software “It’s fixed spaced”?