I am using Apple Pages '09 to write a document where the font must be in Century. In Microsoft Word, the Century font has an italics, bold, and underline option. However, in Pages '09 the only available text decoration is underline. Why is that so? And do other fonts have restrictions on text decorations in Pages?


If I got you right, there are two parts to this question.

  1. Why wouldn't Pages allow me to embolden or italicize letters in Century?
    • Probably because you don't have a bold or italic versions of the font on your system, as ahruss said. I think they are not bundled with the system by default.
  2. If so, why is it possible in Word and not possible in Pages? What's the difference?
    • When the system does not have a ready-made bold/italic typeface, Word works around by mathematically slanting the regular glyphs or making each stroke of the glyphs thicker. This usually does the job, but the output is ugly (try italicizing Times New Roman and Century on MS Word and compare the results -- especially the lower case letters). This is probably why Pages do not perform this workaround, forcing the user to select another font with all the text styles ready-made.

(Correct me if I'm wrong -- I know a little bit about fonts but I haven't used Pages)


It probably means you don't have the bold and italic versions installed. You can get those versions by downloading them (here, for example). Just Google search for century bold and century italic.

Fonts are all basically just collections of images. Bold and italic ones are actually completely different fonts, just sometimes they're packaged together rather than as separate fonts. Some fonts don't have bold or italic versions at all. That's why some fonts don't have those options sometimes.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .