On 2015-02-09 11:56, Simon Albrecht wrote:
Hello everybody,
then it seems I have been deceived by the fact that there is a separate
file for each bold, italic and bold italic in the .zip provided via the
download link I sent along. Thanks for the information.
Huh? The EB...-0.016.zip on Bitbucket? I see neither "bold" nor "bold
italic" mentioned there?
Still, I wonder: I tried it out even in leafpad (ubuntu's simple text
editor) and it recognised the bold series.
In my experience, the less professional the application, the more likely
that it offers fake bold and fake italic "by accident". Even the most
simple editors can have them. AFAIU, the easy-to-use and
ready-to-deploy frameworks for text rendering (like Gtk and Qt widgets,
which are used by many applications shipped with Ubuntu/Gnome and KDE)
have the fake functionality built-in into the underlying library, and
offering it is no additional effort to the application programmer at
all. No need to grey out the bold button, too, and no complaints by
users who report that "bold doesn't work".
I guess that applications like LilyPond, {Xe,Lua}LaTex or Scribus indeed
jump through a fair number of hoops to /avoid/ those easy-to-use
high-level libraries and have direct access to the fonts and font features.
On a side note: In LibreOffice, if you use the "Format > Character"
dialog, a message is shown if a font style is only simulated, and you
can select additional weights or variants for fonts that offer them
(e.g. Linux Libertine with Regular, Semibold and Bold). It makes sense
that no fake bolds do not seem to be offered for fonts whose name
contains "black", "bold" or "heavy"; for "medium", only a fake "Bold
Italic" variant is suggested.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of a way to specify OpenType Features
like "use only common ligatures" or "use lining figures" for a font, in
contrast to what is possible with fontspec for {Xe,Lua}LaTeX.
Maybe I'd personally accept
small aesthetical drawbacks in the bold typeface (which isn't used much
anyway) in order to enjoy the IMO absolutely ravishing medium series...
or just use a medium title, which is also interesting for a change, if
also not as convincing as bold.
One additional warning about such fonts; less important with sheet
music, probably, but more so with typical LibreOffice documents: If at
some point in time (or in the exhaustive font collection of a publishing
and printing company) a bold variant of the font exists, it will be used
in the place of your fake bold. And it will have a different metric and
spacing than the fake, meaning that its better looks can destroy your
page layout completely!
Best,
Alexander
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
