Bold Italic?

[msaktype]

Why

• to complete the RIBBI set
• sometimes uses in comment docs
• Shell-prompts often use it?

#82 (comment)

Why not now

#79 (comment)

By the way, I will not be making a Bold Italic for 0xProto.

Because 0xProto is a programming font, and while Bold or Italic is necessary as a means of highlighting other than by color, wouldn't a Bold and Italic family be fine without it?

I know that it is not a problem to have. But I have a lot of other projects I want to do besides 0xProto, and I don't want to add as many things as possible that I need to keep maintaining.

It is possible that I am not aware of the seriousness of the Bold Italic use case.

[Finii]

As the fist why is from me...

I tried to prove the second bullet point, but I could not find any screenshot where a prompt uses both bold and italic in parallel. So probably that does not exist (too often). I think I remember two-line prompts where some information is highlighted by BOLD and some other by ITALIC. Together with color.

The I tried to edit my Powerline setup to show some BoldItalic stuff, but while some in bold and some in italic works it does not render {"italic", "bold"} 🤔

My powerline colorscheme default file

And then, the terminal is controlled by ANSI sequences, and there just is no BoldItalic sequence:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4842424/list-of-ansi-color-escape-sequences

Conclusion

It is possible that I am not aware of the seriousness of the Bold Italic use case.

No, you are right and I was mislead. Sorry for the red herring! Ordinary fonts usually come in RIBBIs,, but for terminals there seems to be no use-case.

Sorry, Fini

[msaktype]

@Finii Don't be sorry 🙂 Thank you for your detailed information!

[mcchrish]

Bold italic is certainly allowed in terminals.

echo -e "\e[3m\e[1mbold italic\e[0m"

But the absence of it is not much felt to be honest. I think editor themes rarely make use it, while the most common use case that I have seen is in comment docs like:

Where it blends with italic comments and add emphasis on doc tags.

[msaktype]

OK, I won't start building the Bold Italic right away since it doesn't seem urgent or important. I won't close this issue, but I'll leave it as a task to work on gradually when I have time 🙂

[Finii]

@mcchrish

Ah, right (looking surprised). Thanks.
For me this shows it a bit better / more obvious:

I have also seen this cursive comment with bold, but never when I work. Is that not only in some IDE like VSCode or something? I have never seen it in a terminal, I believe. But then, I never do JS, except when it is unavoidable. Maybe even neovim does that (trying)... No. But it does show a tiny JS icon 😆

[AndydeCleyre]

Bold Italic isn't implemented? So is wezterm or underlying font stuff faking it on the fly? Looks good to me:

(Zsh)

$ print -lP 'Regular:     eizrm' '%BBold:        eizrm%b' '\e[3mItalic:      eizrm\e[0m' '\e[3m%BBold Italic: eizrm%b\e[0m'

Though now that I stare at this screenshot I do wonder about the ol kerning in Bold.

[msaktype]

I'm not really sure how the non-existent Bold Italic is completed or how it works 🤔

Though now that I stare at this screenshot I do wonder about the ol kerning in Bold.

@AndydeCleyre Exactly, but given that 0xProto is monospaced, each character must fit within the same width box. As long as it is a monospaced font, there will be both high-density and low-density glyphs in the box.

[mserajnik]

Bold Italic isn't implemented? So is wezterm or underlying font stuff faking it on the fly? Looks good to me:

(Zsh)

$ print -lP 'Regular:     eizrm' '%BBold:        eizrm%b' '\e[3mItalic:      eizrm\e[0m' '\e[3m%BBold Italic: eizrm%b\e[0m'

Though now that I stare at this screenshot I do wonder about the ol kerning in Bold.

I can confirm this works kinda works in kitty as well (heavily zoomed in for legibility) (Edit: I noticed after commenting that it's not using the correct cursive script here for either italic or bold italic, which I was able to fix for italic later, but not for bold italic; so WezTerm must use a different/better implementation of this generated "bold italic" variant):

With the following configuration:

font_family family="0xProto"
bold_font Bold
italic_font Italic
bold_italic_font Bold Italic

[brzzdev]

Would still love to see Bold Italic added

[cos4ni2s]

Most of these quirks wouldn't exists if the variable technology was adopted.
The reason behind not adopting it is slightly out of place.

[fefedimoraes]

I've just learned about 0xProto from the Trying to fine tune my font config - how to apply script variant? post on Reddit. The font looks awesome!

I am using it on Ghostty, and the only complaint the I have is the lack of the Bold Italic style. The reason is that whenever I have an active selection in Visual Mode — which uses Bold Italic — it falls back to the regular font with the ss01 feature disabled.

I have managed to land on a somewhat satisfactory result by forcing the Bold Italic style into just Italic. In Ghostty, this can be achieved with the following config:

font-style-bold-italic = Italic

While it looks good, it would be awesome to have Bold Italic being natively supported. Here are the results in Ghostty when using the print command posted by @msaktype before:

No Italic override

With Italic override

[arjpar]

I think if there was a bold italic master, you could generate variable fonts with the weight (wght) axis for Roman & Italic slants, using fontmake. I've already created a 0xProto Roman variable font with the wght axis, but it might be buggy (not all features are implemented). I agree with others and think having a bold italic font would be great if you have the time to make it. Great job on 0xProto!