GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 453788
Mimic italic and bold
Last modified: 2007-07-05 19:10:50 UTC
Most fonts you find on the web don't have variants (italic, bold). Only popular and commercial fonts have these variants (Arial, Helvetica, Swiss, etc...). It is of utmost importance to mimic italic, bold and underline the way Photoshop does.
I beg to differ. Artificially creating emboldened or obliquized versions of the fonts is a slap into the face of the font designers. I for myself designed a nice handwriting font. Creating an artifical italic version of an already italic style font creates just uglyness. If you absolutely want to do this you can do this yourself by creating a path from the text and manipulate this. On http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/False_bold there is a discussion on that topic with a few insightful comments. Closing as NOTABUG for now, especially since there has been no proof of the "utmost importance" of this issue.
I'm surprised of this agressive reaction. I never said it was a bug; I marked it as "enhancement", like a feature request. I don't know why slanting a font is "a slap into the face of the font designers". Now, not taking the designer's request into account is sort of a "slap in the face". If people ask for it, it's just because they feel the need. On Photoshop, when you slant a font, it doesn't create "uglyness". It would probably not either on Gimp. But I will not follow your tutorial. I see that you don't want this feature implemented because of your ego. You don't want this feature and you don't care if those who could use the Gimp need it or not. It's not just me. Have a look on the web and see how many people are asking how to use italic in the Gimp. Many. You don't have to implement it. I'm not interested anymore, I'll stick to what works for me, at least at Adobe they care more about their user base than their ego.
Sorry, I did not mean to offend, you just happened to pick a topic I recently got really angry about in some other discussion and which I also discussed recently in depth with a font designer. The anger apparently still shows, sorry about that. The NOTABUG thing is just how it is called in bugzilla, maybe WONTFIX would have been more appropriate. But I indeed think of *not* enabling this as a feature of the gimp at the moment. The "slap in the face" was really what I felt, when I first saw what pango did to my font. I felt hurt personally, which is why I've chosen these words. (And also please tell me where to look on the web. I really have not seen the request made explicit that often, basically the only occurance of it where I noticed is, is what I linked above)
http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Making-text-bold-italic-underlined-11952-1.html#90960 http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/if-you-could-4820-1.html#32199 http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Stupid-question-Bold-text-4119-1.html#26720 http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=913827&page=4 http://www.gimpforum.de/showthread.php?t=266 http://www.gimpforum.de/showthread.php?t=390
I agree with Simon - faux bold and italic are Bad Things. An experienced designer can easily do a faux bold (as even mentioned in the first link in comment #4) if desired. Charles: I think if you want to discuss this more, you should post to the GIMP-devel list. My guess is faux bold is going to be shot down, but it would not hurt to discuss it.
There are cases that the 3 situations apply at the same time: - I'm asked to use a specific font - I need it slanted (italic) - There's no italic version of this specific font I can't tell the customer "Sorry, I can't make this font italic". He would laugh at me and go and see some one else who has Photoshop. I still don't understand why faux bold and faux italic are bad. You get the same result with faux italic as native italic. If it's so bad, why Adobe, the leader, implemented it into their product? I use faux italic everyday on Photoshop, even with fonts that have an italic variant. You need italic text all the time. Any graphic developer would miss it.
Isn't this something that would have to be implemented in Pango anyway?
As far as I know, this is something that is already implemented in Pango. But GIMP prevents Pango from generating oblique or bold versions of some fonts automatically. I think that this is a bug, so I would like to re-open this bug report. I respect font designers and I have played with font design myself. I know that a font designed specifically as oblique or bold will always be better than an automatically generated version of the base font (especially for hinting). I also know that in some cases there should not be any oblique version because the font is already slanted. But I also think that comment #6 is right (at least for the first part). Many graphics designers are not font designers and do not know a designer who could create custom fonts for them at a reasonable price. Besides, GIMP seems to be one of the very few applications that prevent the automatic generation of oblique or bold versions of the fonts. I just picked a font that exists only in one variant ("Isabella", a handwritten font based on a 15th century manuscript). Applications that should care about font rendering such as Inkscape, OpenOffice.org Draw, OpenOffice.org Writer or AbiWord will all let me generate oblique or bold versions of the font. Even Dia, despite its rather limited font handling, lets me do that. GIMP is the only exception on my system. So not only is this blocked feature annoying for graphics designers (and their customers), but it is also inconsistent with other applications.
There was an earlier bug report about this feature (bug #307985), so I am marking this one as a duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 307985 ***
I'd appreciate if someone (not me) would move this to gimp-devel. Just a few comments: - most of the comments linked above seem to mourn the lack of the ability to denote text spans in a text layer as bold, which is an entirely different issue. - Pango indeed automatically generates oblique and bold variants - it is impossible for an application to detect artificially generated fonts - which is one of the reasons, why gimp resorts to fontconfig for enumerating the fonts - Inkscape (and Abiword?) just relies on Pango for its font handling and hence automatically gets those. - Scribus does *not* have automatically generated variants (and I happen to consider this more significant than the other applications in regard to this) Besides, an idea for an IMHO "right" solution is outlined in the discussion I mentioned in my first comment. (And - last but not least - I consider doing stuff "the right way" more important than making all users happy)
If you take a marketing standpoint, when you decide to market a product, in a competitive environment, the right way is to design your product the way most of your target audience expects it to be (making all users happy).
We don't use fontconfig to enumerate the fonts in order to suppress automatically generated oblique and bold variants. The only reason that GIMP is doing is because of performance problems when using Pango. If it turns out that the performance problem has been solved, there's no reason why GIMP should continue to use the fontconfig API directly.