Re: [ft-devel] Problem sniffing font weight/width

[George Williams]

On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 10:14, Deron Kazmaier wrote:
> This is probably not a freetype problem, but maybe someone here can 
> point me in a direction that helps. I have a couple of fonts in which 
> the OS2 structure contains bogus weights. For example, a (Mac) 
> Helvetica.dfont that the Helvetica Bold font weight is the same as the 
> Regular weight, but the Bold Italic weight is (correctly) larger. The 
> Helvetica font with 10.4 is correct, but the 10.5 is version is hosed. 
> The LinotypeUnivers font I have is even worse. It has a couple dozen 
> weights, widths, plus italics and probably 2/3 report wrong widths and 
> weights.
> 
> I am assuming that there must be some Mac resource or?? that is 
> correctly identifying the weights, or Mac apps would not work with these 
> fonts. Sadly, I expect this from free fonts, but these are anything but!
The mac probably never looks at the OS/2 table. That's a MicroSoft
extension and in the old days mac fonts did not even have it.

I would guess that the mac is simply reading strings out of the 'name'
table (probably SubFamily string ID).