Bold and italics for monotype fonts

[WendyMcF]

I’ve used the font Monaco for a long time now. I use it in BBEdit, and the Komodo IDE, and for emails, and in the Terminal. I have… grown accustomed to its face. To me, its monotype typewriteriness is how what I write should look. So after setting it as the default font in my new favorite application I was well pleased with myself. And then I remembered: italics. And bold. And the fact that I might like to use them sometimes. And then I was sad.

I found a reference about how ATSUI technology can fake italics (and maybe bold?) for monotype fonts so I thought I would go ahead and Wish List the feature.

But maybe the results and the overhead (and can I just say how impressed I keep being with the fact that, by the Activity Monitor’s reckoning, such a fine fine super-fine program as Scrivener seems to have no more impact than running, say, the Calculator!) would make it not worth doing.

As an alternative, maybe it could be possible to set bold and italic fonts in the Preferences.

But if not, I can get used to underlining and highlighting. It’s a small price to pay for the greatness of Scrivener and the stubbornness of my not just choosing Courier instead.

Basically, there are two ways to draw an italicized font:

Select the italic variant from the font family instead of the normal variant. This gives the best-looking results but requires that the font family have an italic variant.
Select the normal font from the family and manually skew it to look italic. This won’t look as good in general but can be done on any font.

MLTE (Multilingual Text Editor), the text engine on which WorldText? is built, uses ATSUI (Apple Type Service for Unicode Imaging) to render fonts, which supports both methods, preferring the first but falling back to the second if necessary. The Cocoa text system, however, uses CoreGraphics to render fonts, which supports only the first method.

So, if you want to italicize a font for which there’s no italic variant defined, your only two choices I see are to either call ATSUI to render it or render the font using CoreGraphics and then manually skew the rendered glyphs. Either way, it’s a lot more work for worse looking results than just choosing a font family that does include an italic variant, like Courier for example.

cocoadev.com/index.pl?MonacoInItalic