Oblique and Italic in same family

Jasper de Waard

I want to give my next typefamily an Oblique (manually perfected, mind you), and an Italic (more cursive-like) counterpart.

SS01 is already taken by some other feature, so I would have to put the obliques/italics in SS02, which is not ideal.

I could have a style called Name Bold, Name Bold Oblique, and one called Name Bold Italic. Are there any known/expected software issues with such a naming scheme? It would also create a total of 21 styles (7 weights) which is maybe a bit annoying.

Alternatively, I could make a subfamily called Name Oblique, that only has the Obliques in it. Or, a family for the Uprights, one for the Italics, and one for the Obliques.

Any ideas?

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Making both is a great idea!

It's good to take advantage of the Italic toggle, so not three seperate sets. But if you do implement two sets I would put the oblique as the primary and the cursive as the side family (although that does depend on the style of the upright).

Thomas Phinney

I will be surprised if you can have oblique and italic fonts in the same large (more-than-four-member) family, without other style or name differences, and that naming does not get you in trouble somewhere — in some apps or environments.

Jasper de Waard

Does anyone know how it's done in Underware's Auto (which actually has three sets of italics)?

Mark Simonson

What makes ss02 not ideal? Seems like this is exactly the sort of thing stylistic sets were intended for.

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Nick Shinn

I would go with the sub-family.
So many otherwise excellent typographers don’t even know that Stylistic Sets exist.

But you can still include the Obliques as a Stylistic Set in the Italics (and vice versa).

Jasper de Waard

@Mark Simonson What Nick said. And, sadly, a stylistic set is just much harder to reach than a different style.

I imagine that for the end user, it would be most useful to have two families with both uprights and italics (meaning the same uprights are included twice). That way, I could just call it Name 1 and Name 2 (much like Auto). Makes sense?

Mike Wenzloff

As a person who uses type more than creating it, I use the heck out of stylistic sets, alts, etc. Every designer or layout person I know expects such features.

To me, it is more of a why create both italics and obliques. What would a person purchasing a family expect? Would they expect a stylistic set for the obliques versus a family member? In this case, I think I would expect a family member.

That said, in my current font, a historical repro, there were examples where both slanted and a weird mix of true italics were used in print. And so I did put the obliques into the regular/semi/bold styles as a stylistic set.

Mike

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Consider that you're probably aware of advanced features because you do make fonts sometimes...

> To me, it is more of a why create both italics and obliques.

Because the former can ruin the "mood" set by the upright.

Nick Shinn

Most of the time when I am designing a custom face for a new client, they don’t know about Stylistic Sets. Sure, this is anecdotal evidence, but what else have we?

João Miranda

As a young type designer (finished my first one 5 years ago) and working mostly as a graphic designer in agencies, studios, etc, makes me agree with @Nick Shinn .
I can say that most of the designers I worked with, were not aware of stylistic sets.
But with the new adobe CC update I think it's hard to ignore the popup with alternates.
Personally I would apply a stylistic set, but based on my experience I would do what @Jasper de Waard suggested.

Christian Thalmann

Thomas Phinney said:

I will be surprised if you can have oblique and italic fonts in the same large (more-than-four-member) family, without other style or name differences, and that naming does not get you in trouble somewhere — in some apps or environments.

I've definitely had this sort of trouble before when I had an «Italic» and an «Upright Cursive» for Traction. I solved that by naming the latter simply «Upright», but as this thread shows, that word is apparently commonly used to refer to the default non-Italic style of a typeface (I guess the word «Roman» doesn't sound right for a sans?), so I suppose it wasn't the best of choices.

Perhaps the oblique should then be named «Slanted»? I could imagine that fewer apps have knee-jerk reactions to that than to «Italic» and «Oblique».

(Incidentally, is it a coincidence that some of the «Italic 1» fonts of the Auto family are currently not displaying correctly on MyFonts?)

Nina Stössinger

My impulse would also be to make them separate fonts.

Another example would be Supria Sans, which has separate “Italic” and “Oblique” styles: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hvdfonts/supria-sans/ I wonder if Hannes has run into any trouble with this.

Peter Constable

For certain reasons, and after some discussion, we (MS, Adobe, Apple, Google and others) ended up deciding to make slant and italic separate sub-family-variant axes in the extended-family model that OpenType Font Variations forces. So, platforms that support the full richness of OT 1.8 shouldn't have a problem with a family that has both Italic and Oblique variants -- or even an Oblique Italic variant.

That said, Tom's warning is probably appropriate: it would likely create problems in some existing software.

Adam Jagosz

Nina Stössinger said:
Another example would be Supria Sans, which has separate “Italic” and “Oblique” styles: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hvdfonts/supria-sans/ I wonder if Hannes has run into any trouble with this.

I wonder if Hannes lost any sales because of the terribly misaligned ogonek in /eogonek. (Sorry for off-topic.) And to think Supria won the TDC.