SRUCAD::MARTIN%sc.intel.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Martin Harriman) (11/05/86)
Italic and Oblique refer to two different type styles, both slanted. Italic styles use a different letter form than the unslanted styles; oblique styles generally are optical slants (or the computer equivalent), and use the same letter form as the unslanted styles. Either term may be applied to non-roman alphabets. In particular, Greek is almost always set in an italic font for ancient texts. Mathemetical Greek is usually italic, as well (though the letter forms tend to be subtly different from text Greek). The standard Postscript font may be slanted to produce an oblique Greek font; the results are not as good as you would get from a well-designed italic Greek font. I have never seen an explicit statement, but I presume the intention with the standard Postscript features (fonts and half-tones, especially) was to provide a simple tool for draft-quality work on a low resolution laser printer. TeX and AMSTeX provide Greek, Fraktur, and several other (strange) fonts intended for typesetting mathematics. If you like Professor Knuth's type designs, these will work very well. The MetaFoundry (which seems to be associated with OCLC) provides high-quality "Times Roman" fonts, including Greek and Cyrillic alphabets; these are a good alternative for anyone who prefers Times Roman to Professor Knuth's Computer Modern styles. Owners of phototypesetters (aka huge, painfully expensive laser printers) will presumably bend Postscript to use the manufacturer's fonts, rather than wasting their typesetting machine's capabilities on the Postscript fonts. --Martin Harriman martin@srucad.sc.intel.com -or- ucbvax!ucscc!ucscb!martinh