GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 703325
Japanese text fonts unable to bold or italicize them.
Last modified: 2013-10-04 14:56:09 UTC
Created attachment 248058 [details] As you can see Normal, Bold, and Italics look exactly the same in these 3 examples. While I say Japanese I only tested (MS Gothic and MS Mincho) variations but it might be safe to assume that most if not all Asian texts are being affected. I can underline and strikethrough MS Gothic and MS Mincho but the bold and italicize effect are not possible for whatever reason...
Isn't bold and italics something specific to a font? Like if the font does not provide bold/italic version about their letters, there is not much any program can do about it. This Wikipedia page seems to indeed say that there is no bold/italic "faces" for MS Gothic/Mincho: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_fonts There is only monospaced and proportional faces. In any cases, I managed to have bold/italic on Japanese texts with some random Japanese-able fonts I have on my computer (I have no Microsoft fonts to test though). So unless I am wrong, I would say that this is not a bug, and that your solution is simply to choose a better font.
There are a few articles out there, for example http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~tyamamot/aboutitalicsinJapanese_E.html and http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/27/italics-in-japanese/, that claim that some font faces are unpopular for Japanese fonts.
So if I am not mistaken, the conclusion is that these specific fonts simply have no bold/italic faces. Hence that's a NOTABUG resolution. No?
Exactly.
Hi, I update this ticket. It is still closed, but changing status as a duplicate of bug 708110. At the time, I did not realize there was an existing feature to simulate bold/italic for fonts without such faces. But recently I discovered we had this, and we indeed lost the feature on the Windows release of GIMP 2.8.6, so the NOTABUG status was an error. This was a configuration issue, that we now fixed. There may be a new bugfix release of GiMP some time soon, and it will include the fix. In the meantime, if you wish to fix your existing installation, here is the way: 1/ Edit C:\Program Files\Gimp 2\etc\fonts\fonts.conf (or wherever else GIMP is installed, but that's the default path) with a text editor. 2/ You'll find a line like this: <include ignore_missing="yes">/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/etc/fonts/conf.d</include> 3/ Change it to: <include ignore_missing="yes">conf.d</include> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 708110 ***