The other day when I was talking about You say ĭtalics, I say ītalics. It is much more complicated in Cyrillic, the difference between the way italic/oblique font styles are thought of in different languages/locales was one of the interesting issues, something that Ssimon Daniels mentioned in response to RubenP's point about "And ditto on the synthetic obliques. I mean, why does Verdana have a real oblique, but Tahoma doesn't. It's the same bloody typeface!":
Tahoma was created for UI, and our traditionally our UI doesn't use italics (some languages we localize into don’t really have an Italic concept). However, the point is well taken, as we can't control where a font gets used we decided to include Italics (true ones) in Segoe UI, based on the amount of fake Tahoma Italic we’ve seen over the years on the web and elsewhere.
As for Frutiger Next Italics. Linotype obviously lifted that idea straight from Myriad as a way of getting back at Adobe. ;-)
Michael, if you’re interested in Italics a post on Meiryo Italics would be a good one.
I actually use fake Tahomia Italic in this blog, so obviously I agree with Simon's point about lack of control over the font usage....
But the point he raised about Meiryo (tha new Japanese font in Vista) is quite interesting (even if it was not as funny as the Linotype one!). It gets down to the core issue of who is in control when it comes to typography decisions -- the user or the font.
You see, in Meiryo only the Latins have a slanted form in the Italic font, not all glyphs. So if I take a string like:
Very interesting. 非常に興味深い。
It will slant the Japanese text, which really violates Japanese traditions.
But in Meiryo, it is a little different. Like in this screenshot in vist'a Wordpad:
The fact that the text is marked Italic is really not terribly relevant to Meiryo, it would seem!
Now while this really is in keeping with Japanese typographic traditions, it has been reported as a bug by several different people since Meiryo was first added to Vista, primarily from users who are used to slanted characters.
But it does kind of underscore that font settings, whether they are size, weight, or obliqueness, are actually a preference, one that the font itself might be designed to ignore.
This is not something that everyone is comfortable with (just as people may not like that the letters are such different sizes in different fonts), but it is actually how they are designed....
This post brought to you by い (U+3044, a.k.a. HIRAGANA LETTER I)
