In finale, the handwritten fonts all had italics available, but none of the ones I’ve tried just now in Dorico seem to. (I did verify that some fonts show italics. like Times.)
Are there any handwritten fonts in Dorico that I can italicize?
On Windows, each variant of a font (bold, italic, etc.) normally has its own TTF file. However, some apps are able to “fake” styles for fonts that only have a single file.
Finale Copyist Text appears to only have a single font file, containing the plain Roman variant. On Windows, Dorico gives me choices in that dropdown for bold, italic, and bold italic, meaning that it’s faking those styles. I don’t know why it doesn’t work the same way on Mac, especially when it appears that Finale is able to fake the variants.
Finale did not provide separate font files for Italic (or Bold) styles for the handwritten typefaces; but it did let you ‘fake’ Italic by sloping the type by 12°. It would also beef up the strokes to fake a Bold style.
Windows and Mac treat typefaces very differently: Mac only lets you use the styles and typefaces that you actually have installed. (From what I gather,) Windows always offers Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic for every typeface, faking if necessary, and only those four styles are allowed for any font. So Garamond SemiBold is actually “Regular” style of the font “Garamond SemiBold”. (On Mac, it would be the SemiBold style of Garamond.)
Classic Beige MacOS, in the days of bitmap screen fonts, used to fake additional styles (including Outlining), but this was gradually removed, as typography got a bit more sophisticated.
Finale retained faking additional styles from those days, along with its own ‘unique’ font selection interface.
The notion of an Italic script typeface is a bit weird, because Italic type is already a design based on handwriting; while Roman is based on carved letterforms.
If you were really writing by hand, would you actually use different ‘styles’ of writing to differentiate between text items…?