Re: [xep-support] Configuring fonts from an otf file

Hello Chris,

> I understand your explanation about there not being a bold variation,
> and in fact I am puzzled that Reader can display bold/italic with just
> this font file.

Yes, indeed, there is no separate font file with bold outlines for this
font. However, Adobe Acrobat has a specific feature - it can create an
automatic bold face on the fly by superpositioning the same glyphs that are
a bit shifted relative to each other. This feature is applied for fonts
contained 'Bold' keyword preceded by comma in their name.

Such font names were supported in the older versions of XEP 3 (prior to XEP
3.7). However, the utility of this feature is very limited -- it's supported
by Adobe Acrobat for on-screen rendering only. It means that in the printed
document 'fake' bold face will disappear and text will be printed with the
regular font. Moreover,
to activate this feature it was necessary to use non-trivial tricks with
font names and aliases in the font configuration file. Therefore in order to
minimize confusion we dropped support of this feature and since version 3.7,
XEP relies on real font file rather than on font names.

Best regards,
  Alexei Gagarinov
RenderX

----- Original Message -----
Tuesday, February 22, 2005, 7:01:24 PM, you wrote:

Attached is a sample PDF that I found on the web
(http://www.fastio.com). When I open the file in Adobe Reader 7, it will
 attempt to download fonts for traditional and simplified Chinese. With
 only the simplified Chinese font pack installed, it will indicate fonts
"AdobeSongStd-Light" and "AdobeSongStd-Light,BoldItalic" in use in
 "Document Properties". The document itself shows simplified Chinese in
 "plain" and bold+italic. "Use local fonts" is unchecked.
 CIDFont/AdobeSongStd-Light.otf is installed.

Since AdobeSongStd-Light.otf is the only font file downloaded by Adobe
for Simplified Chinese, I think it is important that XEP be able to
target this font for its full normal/bold/italic "variations". I
understand your explanation about there not being a bold variation, and
in fact I am puzzled that Reader can display bold/italic with just this
font file. But this appears to be the "standard" Adobe font choice for
their readers, so for deployment reasons I will need a way to output
these font variations with the fonts that Adobe provides.

I have seen similar behavior for Japanese (sample PDFs also from
fastio.com), where a single font file seems to provide multiple font
variations (bold/italic).

Thank you.

Chris

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Received on Fri Feb 25 06:30:21 2005