![]() ![]() Incidentally, while writing this blog post and previewing it in Safari, I also noticed that the browser forces regular fonts such as Lucida Grande to slant even though the font family contains no italic or oblique fonts. For the best-looking documents, you should use these real fonts rather than letting a program force fonts into styles they weren’t designed for- a process called font fauxing. Whether you have a Mac or a PC, you should take a good look at the fonts on your computer and see which ones have italic / oblique, bold, bold italic / oblique, and small-caps variants. To see the differences for yourself, you can read a book about typography or check out the links at the end of this article. Real italic, bold, and small caps fonts are carefully designed for readability and aesthetics they are not just regular fonts that have been slanted, thickened, or shortened. This is because typographers know that a regular font that has been forced into italics, bold, or small caps does not look as good as a true italic, bold, or small caps font. Likewise, if there is no small caps variant in the typeface, native Mac apps will not transform the text to small caps. If a font family does not contain an italic or bold font, then native Mac programs like Text Edit and Pages will not slant or thicken the font to make it look italic or bold. One of the ways in which the Mac OS differs from Windows is that it uses italic and bold fonts within a font family, rather than visual tricks, to render italic or bold text. Having worked with both Mac and Windows operating systems, I think it’s fair to say that Macs support more typographical features than PCs. Another place I learned a few things about fonts was Ralf Herrmann’s Typography Weblog, which turned me onto this funny video about some of the fonts we all know and love. One of the places I went to read and discuss typography in eBooks was the MobileRead Forums. I also started to think about tinkering with ePubs to improve their readability or even publishing my own texts in the ePub format. I’ve been puttering around with fonts again ever since I got an eBook reader and started noting the lack of advanced typography in eBooks of the ePub format. Allow me to distill hours of my research into minutes of your time. Since other Web authors have taught me so much and answered so many of the questions I pose to Google, I like to give back by sharing what I’ve learned with others. I’ve spent the last few days in my spare time learning and re-learning about choosing the right fonts, styles, and variants for writing and reading. ![]()
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