Yikes, for some reason I can't post a new thread...

If there are no close substitutes, does anyone know how to create faux italic .otf files?

Using what are basically Adobe Serif faux italics will look too much like one of those cases where the PDF viewer is using it as a fallback for missing fonts.

ITC Cushing is an example of the genre with true italics.

Yes, I do much prefer true italics.

Do you have any other suggestions for comparison?

Actually, Kozuka Mincho Pro does include a full set of italics that correspond to its proportional Latin glyphs. They are at CIDs 9444 through 9737, and are made accessible through the 'ital' GSUB feature, which is supported by InDesign.

That's weird. I have six different weights but no italics. I'm using iWorks Pages, though. Can they only be accessed by InDesign?

Unfortunately, unless an application supports the 'ital' GSUB feature, or allows access to unencoded glyphs, the italic glyphs cannot be used. I doubt that iWorks Pages supports either.

Also, while the Latin glyphs in Kozuka Mincho, including the italic forms, are Adobe Serif, they are based on specific multiple master weights and widths, and are also scaled to be slightly larger.

Pages (and other Apple apps like TextEdit) have a pretty decent OpenType support: Open the font palette (Format > Font > Show Fonts — ⌘T). Open the fly-out menu that is hidden beneath the gearwheel icon, and you will find ‘Typography…’ and ‘Characters…’. The former gives you access to the OpenType features, incl. Kozuka Mincho’s italics. Via the latter, you can manually insert glyphs, incl. unencoded ones.

Amazing! Thank you. :)

Ken,

Would you mind changing your avatar? It's really annoying to see "on one hand, on the other hand" blinking alternately in the corner of your eye...