Appreciate if someone knows how to calculate different weights of typeface in fontlab. I do not get em size. Suppose I made a regular font (400 weight). To make a thin 100 font out of regular font, what will be the negative em value? 400/100=4. So 100/4=25%. So change by em units will be -75 in fontlab. Is it done that way? Don't know why it seems, generating new weight of font is not only done by software. Maybe manual works needed also. If someone makes a italic font style by slant tool in fontlab, will it really produce pure italic or just slanted version? Are they same?
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Generating new weights by software is possible, but the results are not usually usable as is. You nearly always need to make adjustments to get it to look right. Even more so with italic.
If you have drawn two or more weights, you can generate in between weights using interpolation. If the differences between the fonts at the end points is not too extreme, the generated fonts may be used with little or no adjustment.
No. Just slanted type, and it will require adjustments.
Many sans-serifs come with obliques misnamed as italics, like Helvetica and Univers, while Gill Sans and Frutiger Next are examples of traditional sans that feature some amount of true italic characteristics.
Even obliques require more than just hitting a "skew" button and typing in 5-10 degrees, however. Curves need to be adjusted, if not redrawn, to correct for distortions produced by an automated effect. It's a subtle refinement, and I've seen it entirely missing from some surprisingly "professional" fonts I've examined myself, but it means that even for simple Obliques there's no silver bullet of automation (yet).
1) I never miss an opportunity to be pedantic, and posturing—nay, preening—smugly over "oblique" vs. "italic" is one of life's true pleasures.
(Kidding, of course... or am I?)
2) I appreciate true italics so much—especially in the case of modern sans, neo grotesks, etc.—that I just can't bear to dilute their designation. Obliques have their place, and I wouldn't want to live in a world without them, but at the same time they always strike me as a very slight cop-out or missed opportunity.
3) I think enforcing the terminology actually supports the fascinating middle-ground emerging between the two. The rare but lovely "upright italic" is one of my favorite semi-recent* innovations in type design, and it's really only because the term "italic" refers to more than a mere skew angle that it can be paired with "upright" in a meaningful way.
Anyway, this is all just my own perspective. I think the other points of view in this thread are equally valid.
* I fully expect someone to immediately demonstrate the existence of upright italics 300 years before Gutenberg. I eagerly await enlightenment!
Optima Nova Italic gets my thumbs down too.
However when it comes to upright-italics, italics is exactly what they're not. Because they typically fail at doing what the typesetter wants to do by choosing Italic: quite often the differentiation is not obvious enough. The school of thought that concocted the upright-italic (I mean as an italic) did so motivated by an obsession with over-valuing cursiveness.
Functionally, an italic is first and foremost slanted. Even the lowly pure-oblique is a better italic than an upright-italic (which in fact should instead be called a cursive-roman).
That's not to say a quickie slant is acceptable. A proper oblique can be deceptively difficult, especially in a light weight, squarish-round sans. The worst part about making obliques is spending weeks fine-tuning oblique curves and wondering if people will assume you pressed a magic slant button.