Font Families
Professional font designers create "families" of fonts. Most font families contain Roman, italic or oblique, boldface, and other fonts that the designer creates with common design elements.
For example, Goudy Old Style is available in Roman, italic, bold, bold italic, extra bold, heavyface, and heavyface italic. The fonts are designed to work together to produce attractive documents.
Font vendors sell fonts in "collections", each of which includes different fonts from the same family. For example, Adobe sells two collections of Goudy Old Style fonts. The Goudy 1 disk contains the basic fonts, including Roman, italic, bold, and bold italic. The Goudy 2 collection includes the extra bold, heavyface, and heavyface italic fonts.
You should install all the fonts included with each family. Every font you install will appear on the Font or Format Menu within ClarisWorks.
How to Use the Fonts
ClarisWorks gives you three ways to choose between the different styles. First, you can select the appropriate font from the ClarisWorks Font or Format Menu. (Figure 1 shows the ClarisWorks word processor Font Menu with the seven different forms of the Postscript Goudy font installed in my system. Figure 2 shows the same menu after installing Type Reunion, Adobe's system extension that organizes your Font Menu.)
You can also switch between the Roman, italic (or oblique), and bold versions of a font by selecting the "standard" (Roman) version of the font from the Font Menu. Then you choose Plain Text, Italic, or Bold from ClarisWorks' Style Menu. ClarisWorks will check your system for the appropriate font and use the correct font for your text.
Finally, you can use the Command-T, Command-I, and Command-B keystrokes to switch between these fonts.
Each font you add to your system takes up space on your hard disk, in memory, and on the Font Menu. So some Macintosh users only install the Roman (or plain text) version of their Postscript fonts. Selecting Plain Text, Italic, and Bold from the Style Menu still produces different fonts, which look superficially like the italic and boldface fonts provided by the font vendor. However, the differences between these mathematically calculated fonts and the fonts provided by the font developer are apparent if you compare the true italic fonts to the fonts "created" by your Macintosh.
Italics Versus Oblique
With the italics font missing, the Macintosh creates a new version of the selected letters, all of which slant to the right by about 15 degrees. This slanted font is more correctly called an "oblique", not an "italic" font.
There is nothing inherently wrong with an oblique font. In fact, oblique fonts work well with sans serif typefaces and often come with those font families. However, you rarely use oblique styles with serif fonts such as Times and Goudy because the slanted strokes are in disharmony with the horizontal orientation of the serifs in the letter forms.
Font developers avoid this problem by designing true italics, which are cursive characters with the look of hand-lettering. Of course, the mathematical approach does not consider design issues. Thus, calculated slanted letters often have awkward serifs, flares, and other elements. Figure 4 shows the difference between Goudy Italic and the mathematically generated oblique substitute that the Macintosh generates if you command italic without the Goudy Italic font installed in your system.
The lesson is clear: Make certain that you install all the fonts in each family.
Printed Output
As with most ClarisWorks documents, your printed output depends on a combination of the fonts in your system and your printer. Without the italic font, ClarisWorks prints oblique characters on an ImageWriter or QuickDraw laser printer. However, Postscript devices print the document using the Roman version of the font with incorrect line breaks.
Although you can save disk space and memory by not installing all the font styles in a family, doing so seriously compromises the visual impact of your ClarisWorks documents.
Mixing Fonts
Type designers keep the general characteristics of the parent font in mind when they create an italic or boldface version of a font. However, the difference between the two is usually so strong that you can often use the italic from one font family with the Roman characters of another. This is particularly true of serif fonts like Times, Goudy, Palatino, and New Century Schoolbook.
For example, Palatino includes exaggerated serifs, a wide range of character widths, and wide capital letters that draw lots of attention. These characteristics combine to yield a typeface that is lively and daring. That makes it a good candidate to try with italics from other font families. Figure 5 presents some examples.
This approach also works with many other serif fonts. For example, the ClarisWorks Journal uses Times italic with Goudy Oldstyle Roman, with no loss of design integrity. [Ed: This is Goudy italic, which we find less readable than Times italic because of the extra swashes on many characters. This is our standard Times italic, which we find more readable.
Conclusion
Producing visually appealing documents with a computer is a blend of skill and art. Although there is no substitute for experience with different font combinations, the following guidelines should help you produce more attractive documents:
1. The slanted and boldface fonts created by the Macintosh do not offer the subtle adjustments incorporated by professional designers. Make certain that you install the italic or oblique and boldface versions of all the fonts you use with ClarisWorks.
2. Experiment with mixed standard and italic fonts in documents printed with serif fonts such as Times, Goudy, Palatino, and New Century Schoolbook.
3. Always judge your fonts by your printed output, not their quality on the screen. The Macintosh screen's 72 dots per inch (dpi) resolution does not show how your work will look at 300 dpi or greater, especially in sizes under 24 points.
Figure 1