Bold not working in word

I’m using the variable Windows version on Windows 10 x64, and Adobe XD also denies displaying the italic version correctly. It shows as the regular version, no matter what weight.

Same thing happens in PowerPoint. Happy to provide screenshosts if needed.

@rsms This may have a similar solution to arrowtype/recursive#373 (comment)

1. In the OS/2 table, Panose bLetterform must be set to 11, for oblique fonts
2. In the OS/2 table, the fsSelection needed to be set to italic/bold/bolditalic
3. In the head table, the macStyle needed to be set italic/bold/bolditalic (probably not relavent to Windows, but related to the overall issue)

Okay, actually, I got curious and looked a little deeper. It seems that the fsSelection is set correctly. In fact, when I installed fonts on Windows 10 from the Inter Hinted for Windows folder from the release 3.15, the bold style linking seemed to work well for me in WordPad (I don’t currently have Word for Windows, but I think it would have the same behavior…):

So, this might be some kind of interaction between the variable & static fonts, or maybe MS Word just has a bug I’m not currently aware of, or maybe it’s another piece of metadata like Panose or macStyle. But, I was just exploring this out of academic curiosity and wanted to share what I found.

Interesting, the same hinted version for me is still not looking like the bold cuts of the typeface in Word (this is on Mac — so perhaps the issue is on Word for desktop, be it PC or Mac).

@goranalkovic
Do you have the variable fonts installed at the same time as the static fonts?

So, this might be some kind of interaction between the variable & static fonts,

Can’t have them both installed at the same time if they are using the same names.

@kenmcd,

I’m not @goranalkovic, but I think our issue is the same. I don’t have the variable cut installed at the same time.

Looks good in Word 2019 on Windows 10.0.19042

I too can confirm this looks like it’s working on Windows 20H2 (19042.867) and Word & PowerPoint (16.0.801.20288).
I can finally switch back to Inter now. I’ve been using Arial Nova for some time, but really missed Inter.

Thanks for fixing it!

Morning all,

Thanks so much for the time spent on this, it’s definitely ironed out most
of the issues.

We’ve been doing a few tests here and have found that we’re getting some
pretty wild angles on some of the italics when exporting from word to PDF
on windows.

Namely the Italic versions of Medium, Extra Bold and SemiBold. Worth
noting, these all show up fine in word itself, the error only appears when
exported to PDF.


Cheers!

Tim

…

My Export to PDF looks fine.
And I checked the fonts embedded with my PDF editor — all correct.

@timwoolliscroft
Some of the fonts in you image look like faked italics. (they have the Word fake-Italic angle)
You can confirm this by looking at the fonts embedded — they will show as the Regular, not Italic.
Perhaps you have a font cache issue with the old fonts still in there. ?
You are on a Mac right? So it may still be an issue there. Or just need to clear font cache?

@rsms it’s working fine now with the 3.15 prerelase 🎉🎉

@rsms @timwoolliscroft @kenmcd
Hi all, I have been doing some testing with Tim and I have also found the italics come out differently depending on how I export my PDF file from Word. I’m on Word 2019 using Windows 10.0.19042 and I’ve got the 2021.001.20145 version of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC through Creative Cloud.

Below is a side-by-side screenshot comparison of the font within Word (looks good), when exported to PDF using either the Print to PDF or the Export > Create Adobe PDF functions, which uses the Adobe PDFMaker (I tried both and got the same result with a larger skew on the Inter Black, Medium, Extra Bold and SemiBold fonts), and then tried an actual print to PDF using File > Print > and choosing Adobe PDF as my printer and that version looks good too. It seems to be something about the default distiller settings in Word that must be set differently than the PDF printer settings. I tried playing around with some of the settings under the Edit > Preferences > Convert to PDF for Microsoft Word from within Acrobat, but that didn’t make any difference when using the Export feature in Word and still showed the skew on the fonts, even when I specifically added the Inter fonts to the «Always Embed» option.

@timwoolliscroft @heatherhjl Can you confirm which fonts you are using? (Variable multi-axis, Variable single-axis, Constant OTF or Constant TTF) Can you also confirm that there is only one of these «flavors» installed and that you restarted the program after making changes to fonts on your system?

What you see with the funky italics is @kenmcd points out — faux italics; Word applies a skew transformation to the font in order to create an appearance of italics (oblique.) I’m 95% certain that what’s happening here is Word applying faux italic to fonts that are already italic. This could be an indication of a bug in the Inter metadata (which has changed to address an issue in Microsoft products in the pre-release) and/or it could indicate a font cache issue.

Hi @rsms — I’m using the Inter Desktop OTF release from the zipped file you sent to @timwoolliscroft yesterday and I uninstalled all prior versions before installing this one:

The italics actually do look correct to me within Word and when I print to PDF using the actual Print function, but when I use the Export to PDF function from within Word that is where the italics skew more, but only for the four fonts mentioned above (Medium, SemiBold, Extra Black, and Extra Bold) — the others all look the same to me across all three versions. I can see it when I open both versions of the PDF file (printed and exported) within Acrobat and set them to the same zoom level and switch back and forth between them you can see the larger skew on those four. I’m attaching the two PDF files — the Inter Desktop Test is the exported file and the Inter Printed to PDF is the printed file.

Inter Desktop Test.pdf
Inter Printed to PDF.pdf

@heatherhjl thanks!

Observation: the key instances (Thin Italic, Italic and Black Italic) are correct while the interpolated instances (in between) are messed up.

So I poked at the constant OTF files that you have installed. The misc/tools/fontinfo.py can be used to dump all metadata of a font file. Here’s the italic angle of Medium Italic compared to the same in Bold Italic:

./misc/tools/fontinfo.py -pretty build/fonts/const/Inter-MediumItalic.otf | jq '.[0].post.italicAngle'
9.4

./misc/tools/fontinfo.py -pretty build/fonts/const/Inter-BoldItalic.otf | jq '.[0].post.italicAngle'
9.4

They are identical so that’s not what Word is tripping on. I’ve also checked head, macStyle and OS/2, fsSelection which are two other pieces of metadata that should contain an «italic» flag (and it does for all fonts that are italic.)

@rsms — that is so odd because the Inter-BoldItalic does look correct so it is weird that it trips on the other instances. I think the angle that Word adds is 14, which is way too much in my opinion. This could have to do with how the PDF distiller is interpreting the fonts because in Word they are fine and when printed they are fine, it’s only when they are distilled through the PDF export that those particular instances skew more.

I’m 95% certain that what’s happening here is Word applying faux italic to fonts that are already italic.

No, it appears that Word is applying the fake italics to the regular font.
Take a look at the fonts embedded in the bad PDF (Inter.Desktop.Test.pdf),
they are the regular upright fonts.
This is what Word (and LibreOffice) do when they do not find an italic font and so they fake it.

The PDF library is having the problem.
So I checked the PostScript Name in the fonts.
I think that is the problem.
The PostScript Names do not follow the Adobe guidelines which the Adobe PDFMaker library expects.
Fix those and I think this will be fixed.

@kenmcd nice catch. I didn’t have any more time today to look into the difference between the two PDF methods, and most will likely use the Adobe PDFMaker method if they have the add-in installed since it is right there in your face when you go to the File menu in Word.

@heatherhjl I can make testing fonts tomorrow so we can check this theory.
But this is what happens in LibreOffice Export to PDF when the PostScript Names are off.
Same thing.
Hmmm …. I did not test these fonts in LibreOffice,
Should also do that tomorrow to see if it has a similar issue.

UGH!
Watching a movie and keep thinking about this.
Looked at the fonts again (on my phone).
The PostScript Names are fine.
Brain fart.

Will test tomorrow in LibreOffice and Affinity Publisher and see if their Export to PDF works.
Plus I have a bunch of PDF printers to test.