From: "Christopher John Fynn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > In Windows, if you specify bold with "Arial Unicode" the Windows > font rasterizer will generally try to imitate bold > artificially - but this often looks pretty bad. Windows will > also try to imitate italic by slanting the font.
The Arial Unicode MS font is particularly well "hinted", but most hints are unusable when the rasterizer will try to create derived fonts. From what I saw, it is slightly expanding the font width, and tries to move slightly to the left or right some points, according to the direction of the curve (this move is more important if the direction is vertical). For italics, I think that Windows simply uses the hinted coordinates and then applies an affine transform to slant the glyph. But the resulting hints are sometimes poorly aligned with the display grid, and characters may be hard to read if your display does not support subpixel antialiasing. The result howeer is quite good on LCD displays with this feature enabled. But it's true that complex scripts like Han will be poorly rendered in Bold or Italic... But does someone actually wants to read Han text with Bold characters (or even worse slanted with Italic) ? There are etter choice than Italic for Han: use a different font style, or reduce the point size and increase the inter-character spacing, so that the reduced text continues to align vertically with normal characters. I think that Italic is to avoid for most Asian scripts, as readers are not used to it. For Arabic it may cause problems because of the placement of diacritic points.
