Italic Angle

Eluard9 May 2008

In the general info section of a type 1 or opentype font (the only font types that I've messed with) there is a number for the italic angle. In Font Forge you can reset this value, presumably to a more accurate value — at any rate the original value changes. Something is being gotten wrong here, and I tend to trust FontForge to get this right. Do any programs actually read the italic angle info in the font and what do they use it for? I'm curious, given that it often seems to be wrongly set.

Thanks

Miguel Sousa9 May 2008#

> Do any programs actually read the italic angle info in the font and what do they use it for?

Yes. For example, I have seen OTF fonts incorrectly sorted in InDesign's font menu, and the culprit* was a faulty Italic Angle value -- the Italic Angle of the "Italic" font was set to 0 (zero). The value on the other italics in the family (e.g. Bold Italic, Semibold Italic) was also incorrectly set to zero, but for some reason the sorting of those fonts was not affected. Only the plain "Italic" was sorted out of order.

*The fonts' naming was all correct BTW, so that wasn't the problem

cuttlefish9 May 2008#

In FontForge, setting the italic angle has the added benefit of skewing the sidebearing guidelines to that angle in the editor window.

Maybe I choose the terms incorrectly but I think the idea is clear.

Eluard15 May 2008#

Thanks for the help guys.

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