On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:12:22 +0100, Gail Banaszkiewicz <gbanaszk@...1686...> wrote:
Hi everyone, I just wanted to clarify what exactly the problem described in this bug is:
904962 (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=904962&grou...)
At first it sounds as though fonts are actually not showing up at all for some platforms, but I'm wondering if the problem now is simply that the UI doesn't separate font family and variants beyond what CSS allows (so no small caps, outline, swoosh, etc).
If you can shed any light (and I bet bulia can at least), it will be much appreciated.
Thanks, Gail
That bug report looks familiar but I think things have changed a little since then.
Just to recap what we talked about a few weeks ago: currently (0.45.1, Linux) any font variant names not in the very limited CSS standard usually (though not quite always) *DO* now appear in the UI. However, they can not actually be used. If one of these variants - say, "shadowed" in Gill Sans - is selected the font actually rendered will just be the plain font. In the cases where the variant name is a compound - eg "Ultra Bold Condensed" - then only those parts which are recognised by the system will be used to select the font, in this case "Ultra" will be ignored but "Bold Condensed" will be rendered.
I'd really like to stress here that from a professional design point of view, the CSS standard is totally inadequate for text designs. There is nothing remotely typograpically unusual about "Ultra Bold Condensed", "Heavyface", "Extended #2", or any of the other dozen or so varients I see every day which have no CSS equivalent. Only very limited professional work on, for example, product labels, can be carried out using just the CSS font parameters. They should be regarded as a crippled "Are you sure you want to save using only CSS font styling"-type-of-feature and not an end point by any means.
Also, for some fonts (and I've not worked out the pattern as to which it is) styles which are not recognised seem to appear as repeated instances of the last recognised style. For example, my Adobe Jenson Pro lists "Regular" nine times, then "italic" nine times, then "bold" nine times, and then "Bold Italic" nine times. Each of these can be selected and does indeed produce the named variant.
Thomas