True italics?

[be5invis]

I know you have already run out of CIDs, but could we provide a true italics? Replacing all Latin glyphs to their italic form, while everything else is not changed (or slanted if necessary).

[Explorer09]

Why are you bothered to include italics in Source Han when there are Source Sans Pro / Source Serif Pro italic already? If we want Han "italic" font, it would better be a damn italic font with all Han glyphs in regular script (kaishu) style. But that definitely won't happen soon.

[kenlunde]

The ideal way to include italic glyphs in an East Asian font, whose Western glyphs represent a tiny minority, is to simply add them to the glyph set, such as what was done in Adobe-Japan1-4 and higher Supplements. The italic glyphs are accessible via the 'ital' (Italic) GSUB feature, though I plan to rebuild the Kozuka families to include an Italic face, then deploy them as OpenType Collections whose faces share the same CFF. Our latest commercial Japanese font, Ten Mincho (貂明朝), does precisely this, too, by adding a very rich set of Latin glyphs, to include a full set of corresponding italic glyphs, all in a shared glyph set that will soon be deployed as an OpenType Collection.

However, to produce a parallel glyph set that differs only in that the Western glyphs are italic is considered wagging a huge dog by a tiny tail, and therefore a non-starter. Also, Source Serif Pro does not yet have an Italic face. I would very much like to add the italic glyphs, but as we have run out of CIDs, and because proper HK support (that is being worked on) has a much higher priority, it is not likely to happen in the near future.

[Explorer09]

Sorry to ask a question: How are Latin italic glyphs included in a CJK font useful? You know there's no true italic style for CJK scripts, and displaying CJK glyphs (Hanzi, kana & Hangul) in upright Ming in a font that's otherwise labeled "italic" would simply look wrong. Here, I may start to wonder why 文字<i>斜體</i>文字<b>粗體</b> won't give me a separate italic style in the text – I think the problem will be more prevalent if the font is used on webpages. Or it may be just me.

Yes I know displaying CJK glyphs in oblique (the automatic slanted form) would be wrong too, but at least it give some visual differences rather than none at all, if readability is not a primary concern.

What I was hoping is that no italic style should be provided for East Asian fonts unless you do design italics (fangsong or kai) for CJK glyphs. Otherwise just provide a Latin-only italic companion font.

(Word processors have no problem mixing a Chinese upright font with an italic font for western text.)

[kenlunde]

There are plenty of use cases that involve italic glyphs for the Western characters in CJK fonts, such as emphasizing a Western word or phrase, or properly referencing a book title. Also, the Western glyphs that are included in a CJK font are often scaled or adjusted in order to work better with the CJK glyphs, meaning that using a separate Italic face that corresponds to the upright glyphs that are included in the CJK font may not produce consistent results. Of course, there are ways to make such adjustments, such as through the use of CFR (Composite Font Representation or ISO/IEC 14496-28) objects, but they are not widely supported.

[KrasnayaPloshchad]

The italic glyphs are accessible via the 'ital' (Italic) GSUB feature, though I plan to rebuild the Kozuka families to include an Italic face, then deploy them as OpenType Collections whose faces share the same CFF.

You can also try ital axis in variable fonts.