[XeTeX] Using Gentium with XeteX

[Ralf Stubner]

Till Rettig <till.rettig at gmx.de> writes:

> I started using Gentium a while ago with XeteX, but realized, that there 
> is a caveat I cannot solve: The font comes only in two faces: normal and 
> italic. How do I achive bold face? In openoffice or ms word this is no 
> problem, the program obviously has some font information that lets it 
> scale the fonts accordingly. Is there any option in the fontspec package 
> that let you do the same? I guess the idea behind this is, that italic 
> face has different shapes while the bold version is only a scaled 
> version of the normal or italic face where all lines are scaled 
> accordingly. It seems the font designer thought this method is good 
> enough to get sufficient results. But how do I tell XeteX to do the same?

XeTeX does not do that, and that's not a bug but a feature.
Artificially altering fonts (be it normal->bold, upright->slanted, or
something else) is never a good idea, and the "Gentium bold" produced
by Word and OpenOffice are nothing one should try to immitate. And no,
a bold version is not just "scaled".

I would think about the document. Do you really need a bold font? If
yes, maybe you can take it from another font? For example, if you need
bold only for headings, you could use some humanist sans serif font
instead. If that is not an option, then you will either have to wait
till a bold version of Gentium is released or use a different font.

cheerio
ralf