On Thu, 2014-11-27 at 21:35 -0700, Brynn wrote:
Hi Friends, We just need a couple of final clarifications for the new user faq. And fyi, I think we've decided to wait until after 0.91 comes out, to publish it on the live site. This is one, and the other will be in a separate message.
The old item "Bolding has no effect on some fonts" says:
Some fonts are available with in an unique, "normal" variant (i.e. no italics or bold). Nonetheless, Inkscape currently displays four styles available for them: Normal, Italics, Bold, Bold Italics. Italics is correctly faked by inclining the font but bolding cannot be faked at this point. Since the font itself does not have a Bold variant, the result would likely be of poor quality anyway. You should rather consider using a font with a real Bold variant.
In Inkscape 0.91 the GUI no longer shows synthesized font faces so designers will not accidentally use one. Web browsers will normally create a synthesized font.
When I re-wrote it, I wrote that italics can only be "faked" not "correctly faked" because in my experience, I have not been able to correctly fake an italicized font by skewing (which I assume is meant by "inclining"). (To me, italicized text doesn't just lean over, but sort of curves over.)
Can anyone speak to whether skewing is a correct italics or not?
An 'oblique' face is essentially a skewed version of the 'normal' font. An 'italic' font usually has some glyphs that are completely different in shape (more hand-writing like). In any case, 'skewing' is a better description than 'inclining'.
I would use 'synthesized' rather than 'faked'.
The CSS3 Font specification has a nice discussion of various font-face issues:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/
Tav