Typophile - Fake italic - Comments

Good point, Flo.

aszszelp — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:18:58 -0700

Good point, Flo.

It’s the designer’s

Florian Hardwig — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:30:31 -0700

It’s the designer’s responsibility:
If you set Tahoma as the primary typeface, and assign italics to certain passages, then you’ll get Tahoma Fake Italic – of course.
In consequence: If you want true italics, don’t specify Tahoma. Period.

Depends on the typeface and

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:25:10 -0700

Depends on the typeface and the rendering technology. At 10px a well-hinted fake italic might work better than a true italic of a different font.

Also, I don’t think it would be a good idea to do a fallback to the regular style or a different typeface.

Fake italic

jdaggett — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:55:46 -0700

I’m curious what most folks here think about “fake italics” on the web, the slanted rendering of non-italic faces when viewed in web pages. This occurs when font families lacking italic faces are used in a webpage. Common fonts such as Tahoma are like this, even Helvetica under Mac OS X 10.4:
font-family: Tahoma, Helvetica; font-style: italic;

Browsers are forced to do this for backwards compatibility but it seems like it would be nice to have a way of signaling “no fake italic dammit!” so that the browser would either use a non-italic face or fall back to a font family with a real italic face.

Same holds true for fake bolding.