Pango synthesizes Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic faces when they are not available on the system. Inkscape displays these styles in the UI. I can see a use for the synthesized Italic faces (actually Oblique) but I wonder how useful the synthesized Bold faces really are (it is not a trivial thing to do well). At the moment synthesized Bold faces are listed in the Style menus in the Text toolbar and the Text and Font dialog, and they are displayed in the Text and Font dialog preview area but they are not used on the canvas (probably a difference in how they are displayed, the former uses Pango markup in a Gtk widget while the latter is rendered by Cairo).
Question: is it worth trying to get Cairo to render the synthesized Bold faces or should they be removed from the UI. What about the synthesized Italic faces?
As an aside, I am struggling to understand how Pango handles font faces... mapping font names to family names and styles. For example, Impact which fc-list reports as Regular or Normal ends up having the style "Condensed"; the synthesized versions don't include "Condensed".
Tav