Combing Regular and Italic fonts

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1

Hi guys, I hope you can help me with this issue. Its not easy to put in words but here goes:

When I use fonts such as Adobe Garamond, I switch from typing in Regular to Italics and somehow the font automatically changes to Adobe Garamond Italic. (I also noticed that when I first downloaded Adobe Garamond, I recieved seperat files for regular, bold and italic)

Is it possible to do this with the Font Creator? I have created a font in regular, and designed an italic version to it (as I did not like how the regular font looked when you italicise it on MS word). However, it did not change automatically on MS Word. This means that on a document, when I use my font in regular all is fine. But when I want to italicise a word, I have to highlight the individual word and change the font!

Help! Surely there must be a way to interlink the italic and regular versions?

2

See the help file on how to change the Font Type.

3

I read your post and thought back to the first time that I tried making an italic font.

As it happens, I like to make notes as I proceed when making a font. Often, I post the notes in this forum.

I found the following.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/kern-deco/1705/3

The particular artistic design of that font, and of its italic, is somewhat unusual as it was a learning exercise about something else as well (namely kerning), yet as a result of rereading the notes that I wrote some years ago, I wonder if I might have found a possible cause of the problem that you are describing.

How did you produce your italic font to start please?

Did you make a copy of the regular font and then use FontCreator to make automatically a “slanted” italic version, even it you did not like the result, and then change the designs of the glyphs,

or,

did you start a new font totally and use the word Italic in the

Font Family name

dialogue panel that FontCreator displays when producing a new font using

File
New…

?

The thing is, for a Regular font and Italic font that behave together as you want them to behave, the Font Family names are the same.

It is the font subfamily names that are different one from the other.

Please try opening fonts such as Garamond and Garamond Italic using FontCreator and then use

Format
Naming…

taking care to close the dialogue panel using the Cancel button and taking care not to save any changes.

Now please try the same test using your fonts.

I have tried the test on the Garamond font that I have on this computer, though it is not the Adobe version.

Several other fields are different for the Italic version as weel, yet the Font Family name is the same for both the Regular version and for the Italic version.

If that is the problem, then the question arises as how to fix it.

It might be possible simply to change the names in some of the filed names of your Italic font and change some other items as well. However, I am unsure as to how many items would need changing.

I am thinking that if you start with a copy of your regular font and use the Glyph Transformer facility of FontCreator to make an Italic font, using an angle of 0 degrees, then you will have a correctly set up Italic font that has glyphs that do not look italic. You could then copy the glyphs from your original Italic font into the new Italic font, overwriting the original glyphs. Hopefully, the result will be a properly set up Italic font that has the Italic glyphs that you have designed. Hopefully the two fonts, namely the regular original and the new Italic font will behave together in the same way as do the Garamond Regular and Italic Fonts.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

5 June 2012