Font Styles

[ckh]

I noticed this in XXP 4 also.

You can choose a websafe font, say Tahoma, which doesn't have the italic variant (at least I don't) and it refuses to apply the effect.

Dreamweaver has no problem applying it, it can be done in Photoshop also. Viewing the variant in a browser doesn't seem to be a problem, you just can't add it in XWD if you don't have the variant installed.

[Soquili]

Hi Chris,

Xara made a decision to not use synthesized fonts. Some other applications still support applying a skew to a non-italic font to synthesize the look.

[remi]

I've heard, that this limitation comes with Xara Xtreme 4, but why is this within a Web Design app? Each Webbrowser is able to interprete a simple "font-style:italic".

Remi

[ckh]

I can see where that would be a good decision for precision graphics but browsers support the synthesized font styles so I thought it would be beneficial for it to be used in XWD for actual text in the page.

Haven't played around with it too much, but, like many others, purchased it sight unseen and then installed it.

[Charles Moir]

Indeed we took the decision to disallow non-existent fonts - mainly from a design point of view (the computer generated italic is just slanted and a *******isation of the font designers art), and secondly because such fonts are not compatible with Postscript and PDF, and generated huge amount of support trouble for us. ('You just ruined my PDF because it doesn't look like my document'.)

But it's true the argument has less weight in the world of web browsers because most (I'm not sure all e.g. on other platforms) fake the missing fonts.

Trouble is we took the opportunity to re-write a lot of the text and font handling, to clean it all up, make it more reliable, and so it's now really difficult to add all the fake font stuff back again. But it's on the wish list to add back at some point.

But slanted fonts are damn ugly in my opinion.

[ckh]

Thanks for considering it and putting it on the wish list, Charles!