messed up list of font faces for Courier

chadgr · Post by **chadgr** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 4:53 am

Hello,

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of Mellel, I think I messed something up. I was trying to figure out how to keyboard shortcut changing text to bold or italics. Now on the font face drop-down list for my main font (Courier) there are only listings for "regular, bold, oblique, and several repeated bold obliques). Can someone help me get back to what I presume were the default settings for Courier? I need to use italics and I can't figure out how to get it back on the face list.

Thanks very much for any assistance.

Chad

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 6:15 pm

You haven’t done anything wrong. What you’ve seen is some special case of the font courier on Mac OS X. You could read the whole story here:
http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?t=1166

chadgr · Post by **chadgr** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 6:19 pm

Thanks for your response, but I think the link you included deals with some other issue. I thought for sure I had made the changes to the font. Is there no italic for Courier?

Thanks

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 6:25 pm

Sorry, my mistake. The correct topic is here:
http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?t=1135

No, there is no italic in courier. OS X generates a fake italic font face that could be accessed in applications that use the so called Cocoa text framework (for example Mail, TextEdit, Pages, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle…). As Mellel does neither uses this framework nor fakes some font faces, the italic (oblique) font face could be seen in the menu but it doesn’t work. As a solution you could either use Courier new or copy some font face from inside the Adobe Reader package. The latter one is explained in the post above.

chadgr · Post by **chadgr** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 6:36 pm

I'm just going to use Courier New. Thanks very much. I appreciate your help.

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:30 pm

And by the way, there is no italic face for any Courier font, as far as I know. The so-called italic for Courier New is actually oblique -- the letter shapes are not qualitatively different, just slanted. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not italic, by definition.

Sorry about this pedantry about type, but the distinction is real and worth knowing about.

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 3:51 am

nicka wrote: Sorry about this pedantry about type, but the distinction is real and worth knowing about.

Thanks for being pedantry about type. I love when people know about the details of typography and also produce good typography results and I think the word should be spread so that those who daily work with type also know what they do. This is also true for the distinction between italic and oblique but it also may complicate an answer if you speak of some fonts because the type designer have labeled them wrong. If you take a look at Arial, Courier New, Helvetica Neue, Optima or Verdana, you may notice that all of those fonts have font faces that are labeled “italic” but are simply slanted versions of their regular face aka known as “oblique”. The slanted versions of Courier and Helvetica are labeled correctly as “oblique”. So you could simply write “use Optima italic in this case” or you could write “use Optima oblique (which is wrongly labeled “italic”) in this case” and write three sentences about the difference of italic and oblique. While this may be useful in some cases, it won’t be worth the effort in others (IMHO).

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 10:08 am

Right. Your original reply was spot on and what I wrote wasn't intended as a correction, but extra information that might be useful, or at least interesting.

As you know (but others may not) the situation is complicated by the fact that there are two distinctions -- 1) between italic/oblique that are included in a font family and those which are made on the fly by some applications; and 2) between italics and oblique type -- and that phrases like 'true italics' or 'real italics' might indicate the first option in 1 or the first option in 2.

(And of course, fake italics in the first sense (generated on the fly) are actually oblique, not italic, as far as the second distinction is concerned.)

I should get on with some work...