Problem using certain font

Arial Black Bold Italics

[geekay]

I would occasionally like to use Arial Black in Bold and Italics, and even in upper case. It seems to display OK, but only as long as no foreign characters are included. To be more specific, the problems come when there are any marks above the letter, like an O with umlaut, = Ö.

Usually this character is displayed, but sometimes not - not even in my own browser locally. In the latter case there is just an empty space instead of the Ö. I am using IE on Win and my html charset is iso-8859-1. The Ö problem only exists when italics and upper case are both in use simultaneously. Plain bold upper case as well as bold italics lower case are OK.

Any explanations, solutions, work-arounds, alternatives? Or is it hopeless? In principle Arial Black is considered a safe font, I understand.

[tedster]

I can give you some food for thought.

First, when it comes to fonts like arial, arial black, courier, times new roman etc - there is not just one font. There are many versions of each knocking around, but all going by the same name.

And second, even though a font exists, that doesn't mean it contains all the extended characters. I just did an experiment with Ö in Arial Black - bold and italic. On my computer it dispays as O with a bar. Take away the bold and leave the italic, and I see the umlaut. So the bold Ö character in my Arial Black is substituting. At least it's not a square or a question mark or a blank

The land of fonts is a thick forest and there are few clear paths. Browsers come bundled with their own versions of "basic" fonts. Different versions of fonts are available under the same name. Market penetration of difference fonts is a percentage game with few if any sure bets.

In the case you describe I would not try to add a bold style to what is already a heavy font by definition. It's unlikely that the font designer for any version of Arial Black created that character, because the font itself is already "beyond bold".

Test a bold and italic Ö:
Ö