Typophile

Fake italic

jdaggett

I'm curious what most folks here think about "fake italics" on the web, the slanted rendering of non-italic faces when viewed in web pages. This occurs when font families lacking italic faces are used in a webpage. Common fonts such as Tahoma are like this, even Helvetica under Mac OS X 10.4:

font-family: Tahoma, Helvetica;
font-style: italic;

Browsers are forced to do this for backwards compatibility but it seems like it would be nice to have a way of signaling "no fake italic dammit!" so that the browser would either use a non-italic face or fall back to a font family with a real italic face.

Same holds true for fake bolding.

Typography.Guru

Depends on the typeface and the rendering technology. At 10px a well-hinted fake italic might work better than a true italic of a different font.

Also, I don't think it would be a good idea to do a fallback to the regular style or a different typeface.

Florian Hardwig

It’s the designer’s responsibility:
If you set Tahoma as the primary typeface, and assign italics to certain passages, then you’ll get Tahoma Fake Italic – of course.
In consequence: If you want true italics, don’t specify Tahoma. Period.

aszszelp

Good point, Flo.

Captured from web.archive.org on 24 Jun 2012. view this capture