font weight mapping
Different font foundries/designers have different ideas on how to name the font weight. Unfortunately this causes problems, when you want using (character) styles like "BOLD" or "ITALIC".
More often then not, you need to change the definition (from "bold" to "65 bold" or "Italic" to "oblique") when changing the font.
If you have multi-font documents, you even need to assign styles according to the font instead of the weight. Building a hierarchy of styles gets more complicated too.
The idea is to have a table of weight mapping like:
65 bold = bold;
bold = bold;
45 light = light;
light = light;
oblique=italic;
italic=italic;
I suppose you see the idea... The Indesign does the transcription according to the table. In that case, bold will stay bold, and even you could map "extra bold" to bold, if for some reason this fits into your design.
I wouldn't even mind typing the whole font name to get this ...
"Univers LT CYR 67 Bold Condensed"="Bold Condensed"
Abambo
shared this idea
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Abambo
commented
@Janus: sure, what is important is that we can map the different font styles to one system. Today, I would call it a virtual font style. But as not all fonts have the same styles, it would still be interesting to have a custom mapping table.
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Tobias Wantzen
commented
I strongly second the comment by Janus Bahs Jacquet! It'd be better to let us choose, which font table to use for character styles. BTW: the OS/2 classes are in use in CSS as well and would fit nicely for weight.
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Janus Bahs Jacquet
commented
There isn’t even a need for such a complex table – nearly all fonts contain references to their weight according to the standard OS/2 classes (100–900). Just let us use those!
Similarly, nearly all fonts contain information as to whether they’re plain, oblique or italic. Just let us use those!
This is basically how it works with variable fonts, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work with static fonts as well.