CS4 (XP Pro)--missing bold and italic...

I'm working on a book that's been translated into Chinese. The Chinese text I'm using was sent to me in Microsoft Word using the PMingLiu font. While in Word, there are some characters that appear in bold and/or italics, but those disappear when I try any means of importing into ID (as in placing the file as a Word document, placing the file as rtf, or even just copying and pasting from Word).



As I've seen mentioned in other topics on this forum, no matter what I do, I get the pink boxes that I have to highlight and change to PMingLiu (slow but not a huge problem). But I really do need the bolds and italics. I only seem to have ''Regular'' PMingLiu--don't have the bold and italic varieties listed in my font list.



Are those fonts available somewhere to download?



Thanks so much to the oh-so helpful readers of this forum!
CS4 (XP Pro)--missing bold and italic...
Microsoft Office applications as well as many other applications allow you to ''bold'' or ''italicize'' content even when the ''bold'' or ''italic'' version of the font is either not installed or in fact might not even exist. Artificial bold usually consists of stroking the character slightly in addition to filling it. Artificial italic is performed by skewing (obliqueing) the character to simulate the look of an italic style. Although these artificial techniques sometimes yield usable results, they are typically NOT supported by graphic arts programs such as InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop. Typically, bold and italic faces are typical of most but not all ''Latin'' font families but are less common for non-Latin font families.



In your particular case, I suspect that artificial bold, italic, and/or combinations of bold and italic were used with the font in question. InDesign does ''the right thing'' by indicating that no such font exists. If you want to simulate bold, let the characters in question be stroked in addition to being filled. The width of the stroke will obviously depend on the point size of the text and the style of the characters. You will need to experiment a bit. For italics, skew the characters to the right; again you will need to experiment.



Doing a quick web search, from what I can best determine, there are no bold or italic versions of PMingLiu available either for free or for paid licensing.



- Dov
CS4 (XP Pro)--missing bold and italic...
Chinese does not 'come' in italics, only in bold. Any writer using italicized Chinese should have a firm talking-to.

You can do manually what what word is doing invisibly, i.e. add that VERY SMALL stroke for bold, or incline for italic, though I don't think either is a particularly good idea. Make character styles to do it and your life will be easier.



The big problem with faux bold is that the glyphs become taller than the surrounding non-bolded ones, and counters tend to fill in and hairlines get grotesquely fat.

It is as I suspected--no such thing as bold and italic PMingLiu. Thanks so much for your responses!