Why can't I turn text into italics or bold in my Pages document?

Hello,

Some fonts have Italics or Bold as options. Some fonts don't. For example, Helvetica has Regular, Bold, Oblique, and Bold Oblique. Harrington only has Regular. If you choose another font you might be able to get the Bold or Italics in your document.

Good luck.

Wow. To me, the situation is as simple as this. When you open MS word on your Mac and you highlight text (just about ANY text) and press command-b, the font gets bolded. In Pages (far too often) it does not. Skia, for example, a very nice font in my opinion and I like using it. However, in Pages I can't bold it. In MS Word... I can. There may be very legitimate explanations as to why a proper "bold" version of the font is superior to "fake styles" but really, for the majority of Pages users, I'm guessing they wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyhow. Not in the papers they write for school or the flyers they make for the community picnic. I think it's a shortcoming, not a feature that Pages is this way. Chalk a point up for the MS business unit.

That said, I still reach for Pages first!!!

Wow. To me, the situation is as simple as this. When you open MS word on your Mac and you highlight text (just about ANY text) and press command-b, the font gets bolded. In Pages (far too often) it does not. Skia, for example, a very nice font in my opinion and I like using it. However, in Pages I can't bold it.

Actually, you can do with Skia what you cannnot do with almost all other type. Apple Skia is a TrueType Variations font. The outlines are not drawn to appear as intended at one size and one weight and one width. The outlines are drawn to appear as intended at any size and any weight and any width.

Currently, Apple iWork does not enable controls for TrueType Variations (or for Adobe Multiple Master outlines, a less advanced technology). You can work with TrueType Variations in Apple Skia in Intaglio by Purgatory Design, a piece of USD 90 illustration software intended as companion to Apple iWork. Purgatory Design has a forum on the SoftPress server in the UK, another Mac-based package for the web.

Visually, if you draw an plain outline you have to decide what size it should appear at to appear the way you intend. The user can scale the outline up or down, but it will look to light when scaled down and too heavy when scaled up. Software such as QuarkXPress and Word can take this further by applying fake features to the outline - bold, for instance.

Apple Skia was designed by Matthew Carter, Royal Designer for Industry, and developed by David Berlow. Matthew has in one of his type talks said that to him, a face to which bold is applied looks like its contours were coated in chocolate. That is, the face looses its features. Apple Skia can - with TrueType Variations - be sized any which way without this problem.

People who use personal productivity publishing - typically, Microsoft Word - are not accustomed to working with publishing applications that support multiple columns with span heads for titles, call-outs to attract attention, and tiling to proof large format posters on small format printers. Today, this is possible in Pages and Word on an A4 printer without PostScript.

If you work with your personal productivity publishing software in its new publishing mode, introduced by Word and Pages alike, then little by little you will hone your typographic skills, partly by looking at what you like in the work of others and partly by looking at your own work. Reading is also recommended, including essays by Jan Tschichold who is the father of Functionalism in typography. Tschichold taught at the Bauhaus, but moved to Switzerland at the rise of National Socialism. After the war he worked a while for Penguin, redesigned the appearance in keeping with the principle that cheap books don't have to be nasty books. Jan Tschichold's assistant at Penguin was Erik Ellegaard Frederiksen who went on to teack at Den Grafiske Højskole here in København.

Best wishes,

Henrik Holmegaard

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A search with the complex keyword "italic" gave me this link:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6361806

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 16 juin 2008 20:19:20)

When I click on bold or italics in the toolbar (after highlighting text that I want to convert) nothing happens.

You are right and you are wrong at the same time -:).

If you are accustomed to multiple column page layout and single column wordprocessing in the 1980s and 1990s, then these technologies did not provide properly for typography.

These technologies supported fake styles on the fly, scaling capitals down to small capitals, numbers down to small superiors or small inferiors, and so forth.

These technologies also supported fake cursive (Eng. italics) from antiqua (Eng. roman). In all fairness, they did also select the right deliberately drawn style if available.

In 1994, Apple introduced a model that allowed a glyph to be drawn on the desktop display and deskside printer even if the glyph was not depicted as a character in a character set.

This meant that the type maker could include small capitals, small inferiors, small inferiors, ligatures and much more into the file of type along with user controls to select the composition features.

Rather than have you scale a properly designed capital down to a small capital which is too light and too narrow, Apple's technology lets you pick a small capital without changing font file.

Spelling, sorting, searching - all of this works as it should since you are only changing the stylistics at the level of composed type. You are NOT changing the semantics at the level of coded text.

You could not do this in Aldus PageMaker, Word, QuarkXPress, Nisus, FrameMaker and more with Adobe Type 1 products as you there had to sacrifice your correctly coded text by changing it in order to get correctly composed type. This idea was counterproductive since spelling, sorting, and searching as key to computer communication.

Best wishes,

Henrik