Apply style: how to change the font

Questions & Suggestions
1

is it impossible to leave the regular/bold/italic choice unchanged?

2

Actually Regular, Bold, Italic etc. are not styles in the same sense as Color or Strikethrough etc. They are rather individual fonts, belonging to the same font family (aka typeface).

So your question boils down to “is it possible to leave the font unchanged?” and that you can do:

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3

The whole point was to change the font without affecting the italic or boldness of the text. So, it seems impossible, according to your description.

4

With some heuristic intelligence it would certainly be possibly to map styles correctly in many cases.

But what if your source font is an Italic and your target font family only comprises a Regular font? Should it silently map to Regular or should it throw an error? What if your source font is a BoldItalic and your target font family only comprises Regular, Italic and Bold? Should it map to Italic or to Bold, or should it throw an error?

Or think of all the extra weights like Ultra, Black, Heavy, Medium, Semibold, Light, ExtraLight, Thin which only exist in fully-developed font families. I your source font is Myriad Pro Light und you are mapping to Helvetica Neue then you are lucky, since there is a Helvetica Neue Light, but in many cases a mapping would be impossible.

5

Tom, I'm no expert here, but I believe one of the benefits of truetype fonts is the ability to apply a style for which an explicit variation is not provided. IAC, somehow for years MS Word has supported applying the styles (B, I, etc) to text of any font.

But I could definitely be wrong. If anyone has two font families for which one is missing some of the variants, I'd be happy to test in MS Word 2011.

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6

Yes, you can do that. You can for example simulate Italics by skewing and slanting the Regular font, and some office programs indeed do this without a warning…

But this has nothing to do with the available font styles of a given font family. This is an extreme example, since Lucida has very expressive Italics, but you get the idea:

While this can be a solution for usage in email etc., I would certainly not be pleased if an KM action gives me a simulated font style!

7

At the same time, most fonts do offer the standard variants: bold, italics, etc.
It would be very nice if KM would allow the selection of a new base font, and keep the styles of the current clipboard. So, if I copied helvetica bold italic, I could change to verdana, and it would retain the bold italic.

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8

Yes, as said, this would certainly work in many cases. But at the same time it would open the door to a variety of problems:

  1. KM would need to have knowledge of the attributes of the available fonts of a family. [1]
  • In many cases it will be straightforward, since, as you said, many families come with the four base fonts (Regular, Italic, Bold, BoldItalic). No mapping problem here.
  1. If it is not straightforward, then KM has to make an educated decision:

Some examples for what I consider “educated” (multiple choices):

  • If the source font is of style Italic, and the target family only provides an Oblique font (e.g. DejaVu),

  • then take the Oblique -> probably best

  • then leave the source font completely untouched -> easy and safe

  • then take the Regular font of the target family and throw an error -> easy and safe

  • If the source font is of style SemiBold, and the target family doesn’t contain a SemiBold font,

  • then take the nearest one in terms of weight, e.g. Medium or Bold [2] -> probably best(?)

  • then throw a dice between Medium and Bold, or between Bold and Regular :wink:

  • then leave the source font completely untouched -> easy and safe

  • then take the Regular font of the target family and throw an error -> easy and safe

So, I’m not sure if it is worth the hassle…
‌‌

In case anybody is going to say now “If no Italic/Light/Bold font is available then compute/simulate one (just like Word does)!”:

  • The minor problem is that the result is very ugly (in fact it’s a deformed font face)
  • The major thing is that those “styles” are not fonts at all, they rather are private attributes of the word processor that has created them. And this makes them unreliable for any transfer via clipboard:
  • Create a Tahoma “Italic” in MS Word and copy/paste it to Nisus -> Nisus will show it similar as Word does. Fine.
  • Create a Tahoma “Italic” in Nisus and copy/paste it to Word -> MS Word will show it as Regular.
  • Create a Tahoma “Italic” either in Nisus or MS Word and copy/paste it to TextEdit -> TextEdit will show it as Regular.
  • The last thing is that for such style computations you would need the appropriate methods and I doubt that any macOS framework provides such (I might be wrong).

[1] It is probably helpful if we don’t mix up – terminology-wise – different levels:

  • “font” describes something on file level
  • “style”, “variant”, “family” describes something on appearance level
    ‌

[2] Cf. the font-weight property in CSS. See here, especially “Fallback”.

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9

That was exactly I was thinking. Thanks

10

Sorry, I was ignorant/sloppy in my terminology. :wink:

11

This wasn’t directed specifically to you, I was sloppy too. I just realized that mixing up the mentioned terms will contribute to the misconception that Italic, Bold etc. are attributes of a font, like Underline, Size or Color.