Bold assignment for weights other than Regular?

Christian Thalmann
Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,079
in Type Design Technique & Theory
One of my users said they used Ysabeau Medium as their go-to font in Word, but found it unfortunate that Word's bold function doesn't work on it. I've assigned the Bold weight as the bold version of Regular, of course, but I haven't made any such assignments for the other weights. Should I, or will that cause more trouble than it's worth?
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  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,381
    You can make ExtraBold the “bold” of Medium, but I have a feeling that “what could possibly go wrong?” would, if the fonts are “out there.”
    However, why not rename a couple of fonts for this user?—it’s the least amount of work that one could do to customize a font(s). 
  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 361
    I have on occasion toyed with remapping the standard RIBBI styles to a different scheme, for example putting regular weight small caps in the bold or bold italic slots, swash italic in bold italic, etc, when a font neither has nor arguably needs a bold version. It’s the kind of thing that can make sense in one little world as long as it never escapes into the larger world and wreaks havoc, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria etc.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,517
    John, stuff like that only works for bespoke fonts that the client is asking for it.
  • pereelmagne
    pereelmagne Posts: 15
    I also use Ysabeau Medium as “regular”. Please, go ahead and make the adjusment. Thanks in advance.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,564
    Christian Thalmann said:
    One of my users said they used Ysabeau Medium as their go-to font in Word, but found it unfortunate that Word's bold function doesn't work on it. I've assigned the Bold weight as the bold version of Regular, of course, but I haven't made any such assignments for the other weights. Should I, or will that cause more trouble than it's worth?
    In Google Fonts testing we found that this caused more problems than it was worth across all platforms and apps we target, so we only allow os/2 weight 700 to be "bold" in other metadata.

    I believe @Thomas Phinney led testing on this, it was many years ago. 

    I think doing it for that user is fine, tho
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,166
    I can’t find it online, but luckily I saved a copy some years back.

    Fair warning: this info is about 20 years old, and was assembled for the crossover of OpenType usWeightClass values with ancient un-savvy Windows apps using the GDI API. Newer APIs and apps may not have the same limitations (probably better, but could be worse, who knows?!).

    You can tell how old this is because I refer to Illustrator 9 and Photoshop 6 as newer Adobe apps, lol.

    Usable values

    For a font which is "regular" (not style-linked as the bold version of something else), any weightclass value from 250 to 1000 seems to work.

    Having a weightclass of 100 or 200 can result in a "smear bold" or (unintentionally) returning the style-linked bold. Because of this, you may wish to manually override the weightclass setting for all "extra light," "ultra light" or "thin" fonts.

    It is possible to use manual overrides to change values to any desired number. Be aware that some applications may begin to use weightclass in ways you have not anticipated. For example, newer Adobe applications (starting with Illustrator 9 and Photoshop 6) are using the weightclass where present to help determine sorting order of font submenus for all fonts sharing the same "preferred family." For this reason, we recommend that even if manual weightclass overrides are deemed necessary, font developers should preserve at least the relative weight relationships of all fonts within any given "preferred family."

    Here are what ranges of weightclasses appear to work consistently as the "bold" style-links from any given base weightclass, along with what names are normally associated with the given weightclass values (association made by makeotf by default, based on the OpenType spec).

    REG   BOLD RANGE (only tested in increments of 50)
250:  600-1000 Thin, extra light, ultra light at this value can bold to semibold or heavier
300:  600-950 Light can bold to medium, semi/demi, bold, extra-bold/ultra, or heavy
350:  600-900 (undefined) can bold to medium, semi/demi, bold, extra-bold/ultra, or heavy
400:  600-850 Regular can bold to semi/demi, bold, or extra-bold/ultra
450:  600-800 (undefined) can bold to semi/demi, bold, or extra-bold/ultra
500:  650-750 Medium can bold to bold
550:  600-800 (undefined) can bold to semi/demi, bold, or extra-bold/ultra
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,166
    Note that just because I know how to do it... does not mean I normally would.
    It would need to be pretty unusual circumstances for me to do anything other than link 400 to 700 and be done with it.

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