Photoshop, fonts and faux styles for printing

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Hi guys,

I am a web designer and developer and I recently had a client ask me to do print design. I have never done print before so I downloaded a guide from the printers for preparing documents for print, however there is one thing that confuses me. It says use the real fonts wherever possible and avoid using the bold and italic buttons.

Does this apply to photoshop and faux styles? I am using the bold and italic options if available in the character menu as I have done for web for many years.

I was worried that this wasn’t the correct way so I looked for the real fonts. I have great difficulty downloading the bold and italic versions of certain fonts as they cost a lot of money and when I did find one (century gothic) I went to paste the font into the windows fonts folder and it said that century gothic is already installed. I did a search and I could only see the regular font in this folder. Does this mean that the bold and italic versions are somehow bundled together ?

I am confused :frowning:

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I don’t know the setup in Windows, but on the Mac, “Century Gothis” is a collection of fonts, such as regular, italic, bold and bold italic. So it’s worth checking what is contained in the Century Gothic bundle before buying it.

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Hi thanks for the reply Ralph,

Yes it’s the same on Windows, it is a set of fonts containing all the bold and italic versions. That said, from Photoshop cs2 onwards all fonts are vector based unless you specifically rasterize them which means that you don’t have to worry about using bold and italic for print anymore. Previous versions used to automatically rasterize to create the bold or italic effects if the fonts weren’t present which is why some printers issue the warning.

Had to google quite a bit to find that out so I hope it helps anyone one else who is worried about using Photoshop fonts for print.