Re: [xep-support] Configuring fonts from an otf file

I'm not sure that's quite right. I just tried printing one of those
Chinese PDFs with "fake" bold, and bold text prints on paper in bold
(Adobe Reader 7.0). I don't see how automatic bold generation is all
that different in principle from automatic slanting, which XEP does
support. There is no downside to supporting automatic bold generation:
Adobe's Reader supports it fully, and supporting it in XEP simply means
the ability to specify the ", bold" variant, which the new font file
format does not support.

This is a big issue in practice. Adobe's reader will auto-download only
the plain font (AdobeSongStd-Light, for simplified Chinese). Adobe does
not provide bold/bolditalic variants of these fonts, and understandably
so, because of their size. This is because Adobe's reader fully supports
generating "fake" bold, italic and bold+italic variants, both for
viewing and printing. So how should I generate bold CJK text in PDFs for
a wide audience?

Chris

Alexei Gagarinov wrote:

>Hello Chris,
>
>>I understand your explanation about there not being a bold variation,
>>and in fact I am puzzled that Reader can display bold/italic with just
>>this font file.
>>
>>
>Yes, indeed, there is no separate font file with bold outlines for this
>font. However, Adobe Acrobat has a specific feature - it can create an
>automatic bold face on the fly by superpositioning the same glyphs that are
>a bit shifted relative to each other. This feature is applied for fonts
>contained 'Bold' keyword preceded by comma in their name.
>
>Such font names were supported in the older versions of XEP 3 (prior to XEP
>3.7). However, the utility of this feature is very limited -- it's supported
>by Adobe Acrobat for on-screen rendering only. It means that in the printed
>document 'fake' bold face will disappear and text will be printed with the
>regular font. Moreover,
>to activate this feature it was necessary to use non-trivial tricks with
>font names and aliases in the font configuration file. Therefore in order to
>minimize confusion we dropped support of this feature and since version 3.7,
>XEP relies on real font file rather than on font names.
>
>Best regards,
> Alexei Gagarinov
>RenderX
>
>----- Original Message -----
>Tuesday, February 22, 2005, 7:01:24 PM, you wrote:
>
>Attached is a sample PDF that I found on the web
>(http://www.fastio.com). When I open the file in Adobe Reader 7, it will
> attempt to download fonts for traditional and simplified Chinese. With
> only the simplified Chinese font pack installed, it will indicate fonts
>"AdobeSongStd-Light" and "AdobeSongStd-Light,BoldItalic" in use in
> "Document Properties". The document itself shows simplified Chinese in
> "plain" and bold+italic. "Use local fonts" is unchecked.
> CIDFont/AdobeSongStd-Light.otf is installed.
>
>Since AdobeSongStd-Light.otf is the only font file downloaded by Adobe
>for Simplified Chinese, I think it is important that XEP be able to
>target this font for its full normal/bold/italic "variations". I
>understand your explanation about there not being a bold variation, and
>in fact I am puzzled that Reader can display bold/italic with just this
>font file. But this appears to be the "standard" Adobe font choice for
>their readers, so for deployment reasons I will need a way to output
>these font variations with the fonts that Adobe provides.
>
>I have seen similar behavior for Japanese (sample PDFs also from
>fastio.com), where a single font file seems to provide multiple font
>variations (bold/italic).
>
>Thank you.
>
>Chris
>
>
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Received on Fri Feb 25 08:31:39 2005