<font-issues out-of-topic=maybe>
Karl Pentzlin wrote:
Regardless which *true italic* form of the "t" you may expect - to show
slanted Cyrillic letters when italics are requested is simply a bug.
A bug in a Microsoft application? Surprising! :-)
But, no, this case cannot qualify as a bug because, AFAIK, MS Word et al. do
not distinguish "italic" from "slanted": the two properties are considered
one and the same thing, deliberately.
You are right saying that such a simplification would not be acceptable in a
graphics professional environment (e.g. in an application like Quark
Express), but MS Word and other word processors are not for publishing
professionals. The average user of a word processor, probably, just knows
that italic letters have a different inclination, but never noticed that
they also have different shapes. So, IMHO, it is perfectly acceptable to
collapse the two concepts in such everybody's-everyday writing tools: this
matches the users' expectations and lets them concentrate on what they
really want to do: writing a document.
Moreover I insist that, in all modern European alphabets, the typical
sans-serifs italic is just a slanted versions of the corresponding roman.
This is certainly not universal, but I would rather consider "atypical" the
san-serifs fonts that diverge from this practice. (Someone already corrected
me on this point: what I call "sans-serifs" should actually be called
"*geometric* or *modern" sans-serifs" but, again, usage rules)
Marco.
</font-issues>
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