Re: EB Garamond font-series

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2015-02-09 11:56, Simon Albrecht wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> then it seems I have been deceived by the fact that there is a separate
> file for each bold, italic and bold italic in the .zip provided via the
> download link I sent along. Thanks for the information.

Huh?  The EB...-0.016.zip on Bitbucket?  I see neither "bold" nor "bold 
italic" mentioned there?

> Still, I wonder: I tried it out even in leafpad (ubuntu's simple text
> editor) and it recognised the bold series.

In my experience, the less professional the application, the more likely 
that it offers fake bold and fake italic "by accident".  Even the most 
simple editors can have them.  AFAIU, the easy-to-use and 
ready-to-deploy frameworks for text rendering (like Gtk and Qt widgets, 
which are used by many applications shipped with Ubuntu/Gnome and KDE) 
have the fake functionality built-in into the underlying library, and 
offering it is no additional effort to the application programmer at 
all.  No need to grey out the bold button, too, and no complaints by 
users who report that "bold doesn't work".
I guess that applications like LilyPond, {Xe,Lua}LaTex or Scribus indeed 
jump through a fair number of hoops to /avoid/ those easy-to-use 
high-level libraries and have direct access to the fonts and font features.

On a side note: In LibreOffice, if you use the "Format > Character" 
dialog, a message is shown if a font style is only simulated, and you 
can select additional weights or variants for fonts that offer them 
(e.g. Linux Libertine with Regular, Semibold and Bold).  It makes sense 
that no fake bolds do not seem to be offered for fonts whose name 
contains "black", "bold" or "heavy"; for "medium", only a fake "Bold 
Italic" variant is suggested.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of a way to specify OpenType Features 
like "use only common ligatures" or "use lining figures" for a font, in 
contrast to what is possible with fontspec for {Xe,Lua}LaTeX.

> Maybe I'd personally accept
> small aesthetical drawbacks in the bold typeface (which isn't used much
> anyway) in order to enjoy the IMO absolutely ravishing medium series...
> or just use a medium title, which is also interesting for a change, if
> also not as convincing as bold.

One additional warning about such fonts; less important with sheet 
music, probably, but more so with typical LibreOffice documents: If at 
some point in time (or in the exhaustive font collection of a publishing 
and printing company) a bold variant of the font exists, it will be used 
in the place of your fake bold.  And it will have a different metric and 
spacing than the fake, meaning that its better looks can destroy your 
page layout completely!


Best,
Alexander