CSS3 Oblique vs Italics a font with both?

Question

My understanding of Oblique font styling in CSS3 is that it's the same as the normal font, with an angle applied.

Italics on the other hand, is a separate set of glyphs, that while slanted also feature unique characters, like an extra curly z, or a pronounced y, whatever.

Now, I've been running font-style: oblique, and font-style: italic, on many different fonts. One example would be http://www.google.com/fonts#QuickUsePlace:quickUse however, the situation appears to be no matter if I call Oblique, or Italic, the result looks the same. I've yet to find a font that contains both Oblique and Italic styling. In reality you seem to get one or another.

Does anyone know why this is? I would have assumed by using Oblique as a setting, it would have taken the basic font, and simply displayed it at an angle. Am I misunderstanding this?

And if Oblique and Italic just reference one set of characters, what is the point of it even being in CSS3 when it makes no practical different with all the fonts I've seen so far?

Answer 1

Oblique and Italic are two different styles. They don't look the same; the fact that they seem to look the same is caused by the program that displays the font (ie the browser); it shows the variant that is present, so if you specify oblique , it uses italic if oblique isn't available, and vice versa.

Now it's possible for a font to come with both an italic and an oblique variant, and then you can distinguish between those by using italic or oblique . However, in reality such fonts are rare. Very rare.
Lucida Grande is one such font. If you're willing to fork money over for it.
I also found Kinnari , a free font, which is in the Linux repositories even. (If anyone knows about more fonts like that, I'd be delighted!)

However, if you're willing to experiment a little, you can use a font editor like FontForge to create slanted fonts from regular ones. So what do you do, you select a font on your machine that has an italic variant, then take the regular version, slant it with the editor and change the style to "Oblique" instead of "Regular". There, you now have a font with both oblique and italic!

Answer 2

It is my opinion...

When you pick one family font, it has many forms (normal, bold, italic, ...).

Usually, if you want to display a font cursive, you should use the italic style instead oblique style, that's because it's the default form which come from in the family font that you chose.

If you use oblique style, it's like a imitation used by the browser to display that font in cursive.