Font question: Regular or Bold

[Hector Pascal]

Hi all,

Consider these two approaches to making a title bold:

1) Type the title in Times New Roman Regular. Then select the text and go Text>Style>Bold.

2) Type the title in Times New Roman Bold (Text>Font>Times New Roman>Bold)

Is the end result the same?

Cheers,
Hector.

[motet]

Exactly.

[BuonTempi]

The advantage of using Styles is that you can change the font but keep the Style information. So say you use Font Utilities to replace all instances of Times with New Century Schoolbook, the Bold and Italic faces of NCS will still be applied where the Times Bold and Italic faces were used. Or in a text block with mixed Roman and Italic text, you can select the anchor and change the font, keeping some words italicised.

In the early mesozoic era of computing (on Mac), most apps would offer Bold, Italic and other "Styles". If you had the Bold and Italic typefaces for that font, then choosing the appropriate style would just select the appropriate typeface. If you didn't have the typeface, the OS would "fake" the style, by increasing the stroke weight to make bold and by slanting the characters to make Italic.

There used to be a nasty bug in Finale, fixed in 2014.5 or 25, in which using the Styles with some fonts selected the relevant typeface AND used the old-school faking, so your Bolds would be a Bold typeface with thicker strokes, and your Italics would be an Italic typeface that was also slanted. Fixing this unfortunately means that many fonts in older files have to be reselected.

[gogreen]

Hector: I see you're on a Mac. In Windows, at least, highlight the text you want bold and click Ctrl-Shift-B. I find this method a bit faster than going through menus and dropdown lists. I don't know the Mac equivalent.

[N Grossingink]

Hector: I see you're on a Mac. In Windows, at least, highlight the text you want bold and click Ctrl-Shift-B. I find this method a bit faster than going through menus and dropdown lists. I don't know the Mac equivalent.

On Mac, it's Shift-Command-B. Using letter I, H or U in place of B will apply Italic, Hidden and Underline styles. Shift-Command-> and Shift-Command-< will increase or decrease size in increments of 1 point respectively. Additionally, there are a whole slew of keyboard shortcuts relating to text justification and alignment.

N.

[MikeHalloran]

Hi all,

Consider these two approaches to making a title bold:
...
Is the end result the same?

Cheers,
Hector.

No.

The real question: Does it make a difference?

Normally, no. There are times when it can make a difference in word processing and page layout programs but I can't see it being an issue in Finale if you use the included fonts.

[Anders Hedelin]

An alternative is to use regular style, with a somewhat bigger size. A matter of taste really.

[motet]

There are times when it can make a difference in word processing and page layout programs but I can't see it being an issue in Finale if you use the included fonts.

I'm pretty sure if you choose font Blah Blah and check the "bold" style, the program (be it Finale, a word processing or page layout program) will look for Blah Blah Bold in the installed fonts, which is why I said the result is exactly the same as if you had picked Blah Blah Bold directgly. Same with italic.

But on Windows, Finale will not even let you pick the Times New Roman Bold directly. Is it different on the Mac?

[MikeHalloran]

There are times when it can make a difference in word processing and page layout programs but I can't see it being an issue in Finale if you use the included fonts.

He was asking about Times New Roman, which is not included with Finale, nor are most text fonts commonly used with Finale.

I'm pretty sure if you choose font Blah Blah and check the "bold" style, the program (be it Finale, a word processing or page layout program) will look for Blah Blah Bold in the installed fonts, which is why I said the result is exactly the same as if you had picked Blah Blah Bold. Same with italic.

On Windows, Finale will not even let you pick the Times New Roman Bold directly. Is it different on the Mac?

Which is exactly why your answer of Exactly is wrong. It assumes that, were he to share the file with someone on Windows, would see the Bold font. No, only the regular font made bold. Finale would otherwise have made a substitution.

Times New Roman is a Microsoft font and included with Office and Word for Mac. You used to be able to download it for free--I've not done so in years and don't know if this is still true. It is not included with the Mac OS anymore now that a demo of Word is no longer included. If one has been a Mac user for many years, TNR will be installed since you will import it as you migrate old fonts even if you deleted the demo.

This goes back to the OP. If you are publishing and not sharing files, use any font you want however you want. If sharing files, make sure the recipient has the same fonts you are using. Times, included in nearly OS, does not have the same spacing as Times New Roman. Windows does not have Bold unless Office is installed on the station.

Here's more info on the Apple support site;
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/70 ... 0&tstart=0

[motet]

Hector obviously has both Times New Roman and Times New Roman Bold, and said nothing about sharing his file, so I think I answered his question accurately. I also think it should go without saying that if you're sharing a file and don't have the fonts available, the results will be different, but in the unlikely event that one system has Times New Roman and Times New Roman Bold and the other has only Times New Roman, I guess you have a point.

[David Ward]

I'm not claiming to be even remotely expert on fonts; but doesn't Times New Roman automatically install with Finale even on a Mac? It seems to be the default text font in Finale's own templates on my Macs, anyway. I usually replace it with either Times or Minion Pro.

[Hector Pascal]

Thanks, everyone, for the informative discussion.

Incidentally, I'm not too sure how I obtained Times New Roman (and its associated Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic) on this iMac of mine. I haven't ever installed MS office products on this machine. Nevertheless, I'm always happier to have too many fonts to choose from, rather than not enough.

As a test, I typed a title using Text>Font>"Bodoni 72 Old Style Bold", and then bolded it while looking extremely closely at the monitor. I could not discern any change upon executing the additional boldness. So, I concur that it appears that my mac knows that the font is already bold and so therefore doesn't add extra boldness even if I try to apply it.

On this occasion, I plan to share only the PDF of the score. I highly value PDF because, although it hasn't always been so in the past, its embedding of fonts makes life a lot easier and I can share with (relative) confidence, worldwide, across platforms, etc. I guess that's a whole other area. (Pdf-x, etc, etc!)

Thanks again,
Hector.

[BuonTempi]

Times New Roman (in four styles) has been bundled with OS X since the very first release. It continues to be bundled with the latest version, and is not dependent on installing MS Office.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206872

It was even installed with Classic OS 8 as part of the Core Fonts for Web project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

As a result of which, I'd be surprised if all four Styles were not included on Windows. According to this page, they've been in Windows since 3.1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ft_Windows

As said, you should NO LONGER see any difference between using the style and selecting the typeface, though previous versions of Mac Finale did do so with SOME fonts.