Adobe
Caslon Pro, italic (above)
and Roman skewed in Photoshop (below)
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Of
course you can skew Roman text in an image
editor like Photoshop, but there's a world
of difference between a skewed Roman font
and a designed italic font - both proportion
and shape can be quite different.
This
example, Adobe Caslon, is an OpenType font,
rendered from vector paths to pixels and then
skewed in an image editor; but it can also
be interesting to see how
the the conversion between plain and italic
works with TrueType fonts. To keep the picture
simple I've concentrated here on lower case
forms, the basic Latin alphabet, and just
two styles, plain and italic: if you like
to make our own comparisons, you might look
at upper case letters, other characters, and
bold and bold-italic styles too ...
Microsoft's
Georgia in TexEdit, regular, italic
and regular-skewed
click
for the whole alphabet
|
Georgia
has a plain and an italic version in the same
suitcase, so normally the italic version is
used when you select italic style in your
word processor; if you remove the italic version
from the font suitcase, and then select italic
style in a word processor, the plain version
is simply skewed: you can see here how many
of the letters were designed with quite different
shapes for the real italic style.
Microsoft's
Verdana in TexEdit, regular, italic
and regular-skewed
click
for the whole alphabet
|
Verdana
also has a plain and an italic version in
the same suitcase; but whether you use the
proper italic style or remove the italic version
and let the software skew the plain version,
the result seems to be the same: Fontographer
also offers you the option of simply skewing
your plain font to make a quick italic one,
and one wonders what the point is, when the
TrueType routines do the same for you.
Galapagos
Design Group's Tempus in TexEdit,
regular and italic
click
for the whole alphabet
|
Tempus
Sans is open and honest about the whole thing
- there is only the plain version, and
you're welcome to ask your word processor to
skew it or thicken it or both, it works as a
cheap and cheerful everyday thing on those terms:
I say 'cheap' because it saves 75% of the file
size compared with Verdana ...