Font experts - ttf question

[Michael A. Peters]

Howdy -
Occasionally I purchase TrueType fonts from myfonts.com

I found them back when I needed to do something in polytonic greek and
Linux (at least my distro's) did not have unicode font that supported
the polytonic greek character set. Anyway - Palatino Linotype was what I
purchased for that and it works well.

Since then I have purchased a few others - Helvetica (one of my favorite
fonts that ships with Mac OS) etc.

Today they sent me some marketing stuff and I bit, and I purchased a
really nice looking cursive font called shimmer -

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bluevinyl/shimmer/

It is a cursive font - and has both a regular and a bold typeface.
However - unlike the various ms core web fonts with multiple typefaces,
this one shows up as two separate entries in the font menus, and I'd
like to know why - and if that can easily changed so that only one
typeface is available.

Here is a screen shot of the font in AbiWord action:

http://homepage.mac.com/mpeters/misc/shimmer.png

As you can see - selecting "bold" in AbiWord doesn't seem to change a
thing. My understanding was that there were four typefaces a font could
have - plain, italic, bold, bold-italic.

If there were ttf files for each - then you would get excellent results
when using bold/italic/etc. If there are not ttf files for each, the ttf
engine would try to emulate the bold/italic effect - which sometimes
works, sometimes doesn't.

With shimmer, selecting "bold" doesn't select the bold typeface, or try
to emulate it. I have not tested this font in Winblows or Mac OS to see
the behavior there - but it would be nice imho if selecting "bold" used
the bold font, and one didn't have to select the bold version of the
font separately.

Unfortunately I can not distribute the ttf font for testing since I am
not rich enough to license the fedora list for its use ;)

But here is (I think) the relative information:

[mpeters at devel purchased]$ grep "shim" fonts.dir
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-microsoft-cp1252
SHIMMER_.TTF -macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
SHIMMER_.TTF -macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
SHIMMER_.TTF -macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
SHIMMER_.TTF
-macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-microsoft-cp1252

[mpeters at devel purchased]$ grep "shim" fonts.scale 
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
SHIMB___.TTF -macromedia-shimmer
bold-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-microsoft-cp1252
SHIMMER_.TTF -macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
SHIMMER_.TTF -macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
SHIMMER_.TTF -macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
SHIMMER_.TTF
-macromedia-shimmer-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-microsoft-cp1252
[mpeters at devel purchased]$ 

-- 
Cheap Linux CD's - http://mpeters.us/linux/