Questions about 'regular', 'bold', 'italic' fonts and MKV embedding

[Sakura90]

Hi :3

I have 2 [stupid] questions.

1) What's the real purpose of one font to be available in its several configurations? For example, in this Windows I go to fonts and I have an Arial "family", that has the "regular", "bold", "italic", etc. Then I look to Lucida Console. There's no family, only the regular. Still, I open any text editor and I can choose any font with any style (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), regardless of the font having a family with all the styles like Arial or one only "regular" font file. If the machine can make a bold or italic out of the regular, why take the bother to include all font styles separately like Arial?

2) Let's say I use font "x" in my ASS script. I use it in several styles, regular, bold italic, etc. Should I embed all font styles in the MKV? Or only the regular is enough? Same goes if I use a font in bold only. Attach the regular or bold?


Stupid, I know. I was hunting the fonts to make the MKV and question 2 popped in me. And after looking at the Windows fonts, that leaded to question 1. Ideas?


P.S.: In the case of Arial, the family has "Black" and "Narrow". I don't question those, as they appear as a font on its own while choosing from a font list. Only the "styles", bold, italic and bold italic.

[blubart]

different fonts for regular/bold/italic matter if you care about how exactly a font looks like. i don't see many fansubbers manually adjusting kerning or similar stuff though, so it's safe to assume that for subtitle reasons you can pick whatever works.

bold/italic fonts aren't necessarily the same glyph shapes as the regular font slightly distorted in a persistent pattern, so you can't reproduce those types with a single catch-all external transformation mechanic.
for example the "italic" you get by "italicising" a regular font type with no italic option is actually oblique.

[Sakura90]

Ah, I see. Makes sense. So bold/italic fonts are made by "hand", I mean, the fonts aren't an automatic styling of the regular one. Italic vs oblique, now it all falls in place


But for subs, is common practice to include only regulars then? No one would care if it's proper italic or oblique in some silly subs <_<

I'll go looking into some MKVs I have, to see what people do with MKVs and fonts :3