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

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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


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 :P


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

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