Re: EB Garamond font-series

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2015-02-09 05:58, tisimst wrote:
> This is correct. LibreOffice does fake italic, bold, and bold-italic if
> that variant doesn't exist. LilyPond, however, makes no attempt at this
> and just reverts to the closest one that is installed, which is usually
> the "regular" variant. [...]
>
> > On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 4:27 AM, Thomas Spuhler <[hidden email]> wrote:
> >
> >     Are you sure:
> >     see attachment from libreoffice writer, normal and bold
> >
> > When there is no bold face present, a word processor might `fake' one
> > by modifying the regular (roman) face. I don't know if that is what
> > happened in your attachment, [...]

Yes - see attached.  If you convert to SVG and open it in Inkscape, you 
can see how the characters decompose into the original text (with 
additional spacing between the characters) and an rounded outline.

Depending on the font, this might yield acceptable results 
(professionals will probably disagree) or not - what works for Comic 
Sans does not necessarily work for Zapfino...  IIUC, the less fine 
details in the font, the less ugly is fake bold.
I'd refrain from using such a font in a situation where you really need 
a bold face and cannot resort to small caps and/or different color 
instead (yes, there are /real/ small caps in EB Garamond, those don't 
need to be heuristically faked).


W.r.t. the state of bold in EB Garamond, your guesses are supported by 
the following entry in the SCM <https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond>:

Fonts in this repository: [...]
- EBGaramond12-Bold: Bold font for design size 12pt (very 
rough/unusable; not included in releases) [...]

The last commit on those files was 2 years ago.


Best,
Alexander

EBGaramond_fake_bold_decomposed.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document