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