[OS X TeX] (Off topic?) A problem with the Latin Modern Opentype fonts

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 9 juil. 08 à 11:12, Franck Pastor a écrit :

> With NeoOffice and TextEdit, if I use for example the "Latin Modern  
> Roman 12 Regular" font by default, when I  switch to italic fonts  
> using the GUI interface  of the application (clicking the "I" button  
> in the upper part of the NeoOffice window for example), I obtain… a  
> bold italic font.  What's more, it's in fact the 10pt-size LM bold  
> italic font magnified to 12pt size, according to TextEdit. I have to  
> select myself and manually  the "Latin Modern Roman 12 Italic" font  
> in the "very" long list of all available fonts, for managing to  
> using it.
>
> To cap it all, it works though very well with… Word 2004: with this  
> application, I obtain the right italic, not bold, font, using only  
> the "I" icon of its fonts window.
>
> Is there an explication for all that?

Recent versions of Latin Modern fonts have changed their OpenType  
structure: you've got one "Latin Modern Roman" family containing all  
different optical sizes and shapes (10 Regular, 10 Italic, 12 Regular,  
12 Italic, ...), instead of one family per optical size as before  
("LMRoman12 Regular" with regular and italic shapes, "LMRoman12  
Regular" with regular and italic shapes, ...). Says Font Book.

Different GUI applications react in different ways to this situation  
(= having different optical sizes), uncommon in the GUI world:

- MS Office 2008 sees one font per family ("LM Roman 10 Regular"),  
with several different "styles" (10 Regular, 10 Italic, 12 Regular, 12  
Italic, ...).

- Illustrator CS3 sees similarly one font per family ("Latin Modern  
Roman"), with the same different styles.

- NeoOffice 2.2.4 sees one font per style (Latin Modern 12 Regular,  
Latin Modern 12 Italic, Latin Modern 10 Regular, Latin Modern 10  
Italic, ...).

Thus it seems GUI applications are applying different heuristics for  
grouping .otf font files into families, fonts and styles, and some are  
more successful than others.

BTW, you'll see the NeoOffice output contains actually Latin Modern 10  
regular and italic only, both scaled to 12 points. On the other hand,  
the italic I'm getting with the italic button is proper italic, not  
bold italic.

Have you tried using OpenOffice 3 Aqua (the beta version), instead of  
NeoOffice based on OpenOffice 2? Maybe the situation is better.

BTW2: thanks for pointing out that TextEdit can open .odt files. Thus  
it seems Apple has built into OS X some Open Document Format  
capabilities. Interesting...

Bruno Voisin