Faux bold/italic substitution

basicframework19 January 2006 · 09:39

I’m working with a number of editors who are using Microsoft Word to write their articles. Because they’re not particularly savvy, these editors use the “faux” bold and italic buttons regularly, instead of changing the typeface to the correct italic or bold variant. Regardless of your opinion on this poor practice, it hasn’t proved a problem because InDesign had the smarts to convert faux italics into real italics when the Word docs are imported, making the necessary substitutions automatically. Or so I thought.

We’ve just changed our primary text typeface and InDesign now ignores the “faux” formatting on import. The text appears a straight roman with no bold or italic. I can only imagine that this is an issue with the new font we are using because this is the only variable that has changed — that perhaps the designer missed a step when generating the font files or that there’s a requisite box defining a particular weight as the default bold? I’m talking about in Fontographer or FontLab. Both the old font and the new font are Type 1, so it’s not an OpenType thing.

I’d like to go back to the type designer armed with some suggestion for a fix. (Because I’m making the assumption that the fix needs to be made to the font.) The client has already signed off on the typeface, so simply changing the font isn’t an option, and there are enough italics and bolds set that I’d rather not go back and change them all by hand. Can you help?

Tiffany Wardle19 January 2006 · 10:25

You shouldn’t feel as if you have to have explanations for the type designer. I wouldn’t. I would guess it is a naming issue. But, really, the type designer should be able to explain it to you. No?

Mark Simonson19 January 2006 · 10:42

It sounds like the font is not set up with reg/bold/italic/bold italic linkings. I believe this is the only way that InDesign would know which font to use for bold or italic when it imports the Word doc. It has been common practice for some foundries to set up each font in a family as its own separate one-font family in order to overcome Windows/Mac name compatibility issues. Perhaps this is the case with the new fonts?

basicframework19 January 2006 · 11:09

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve spoken with the designer and indeed, the font was not set up with the linkings. It’s a new still-in-development face, so that simply hadn’t been done yet.

(Thanks also for moving this topic — I wasn̵

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