Italicized Arial Unicode MS? Never on a Mac!

In the main text processing applications on Mac OS X, like TextEdit, Keynote and Pages, one cannot italicize a font, unless the font designer went to the trouble of creating an italic typeface. Some fonts you therefore cannot put italics on are Arial Unicode MS, Comics Sans MS, and plenty of Apple's own older fonts like New York or Geneva and most Asiatic fonts like Hiragino.

Why?

You can do it without problems in AppleWorks, MacWrite, MS Word, OpenOffice and in about any Windows or Linux application.

I have three theories, and nothing to really back up any of them.

1. "Apple wants to protect the users from ugly fake italics and bolds."

This can be a message to send to users and readers. "It is an improvement." "You will no longer see bad italics." However, I think this message is getting increasingly obsolete. It might have been valid when screen resolutions were lower, but with higher resolutions on screens and printers, it is very rare that one sees an unacceptably bad fake italic or bold rendering.

2. "Apple wants to protect intellectual property rights for font designers."

This is a message to send to font designers. However, it rings a little hollow as one of the biggest font designers, Adobe, themselves produce software to warp their own and others' fonts alike.

3. "Apple does not manage to make acceptable fake italics."

This is a wild guess, but it is possible that Apple had problems getting fake italics right in the first version of Mac OS X. It may have been performance problems with display postscript and getting the pixels right on low resolution screens and things like that. If so, Apple gave up, and promoted the lack of this functionality as a feature.


Personally I cannot see any good reason to prevent italics or bold of fonts that lack the type faces. I have never met anyone who has promoted Mac OS with the words "and thank God, you cannot italicise all fonts" or "it is great not to be able to add bold words to some texts".

If someone had asked me, "do you want to remove the ability to italicize fonts without italic type faces from your Windows PC", I would have said "no" with considerably raised eyebrows, and I have a feeling that others would use their eyebrows in the same way.

I have more than once been in the middle of typing notes in for example Hiragino Mincho Pro, when I suddenly felt like adding italics just as a reminder to myself. (6 eggs, 1 loaf of bread, 200g butter but not salted.) With TextEdit today, I have to change font to add the italics. Open the font panel, click on another font, make sure the typefaces are visible, make sure one of them is "italic" or "oblique". Change the font of the rest of the text to match it. Adjust the text so page breaks and images wraps work smoothly with the new font... And I thought computers were there to try to make our life easier.

But I do see some advantages as well. I appreciate the confidence I can have that the italics I use for publication have gone through the approval of a font designer. I am grateful that I do not have to see ugly italics in printed or displayed public texts.

It is just that the advantages are insignificant compared to the drawbacks with Apple's solution.



Apple's font Skia deformed by Adobe Illustrator.