Oswald font problem

Hi,

I am new to FontTalk, but not to FontSquirrel. I was just wondering if I was the only one having problems with the font Oswald. On FontSquirrel.com, there is mention that the font consists of 15 styles. But if I go on Google fonts or other sites where the font can be downloaded, there is only mention of 3 styles.

If I download from FontSquirrel, I do get 15 font files, but when loaded and used through InDesign not all fonts are loaded and some regular fonts appear as italics.

Any clue, anyone? :-/

TIA
Maryse

Hi Maryse,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

Oswald was designed by Vernon Adams, who was in a serious accident several years ago and passed away recently.

Work on Oswald has stalled since his accident, but Font Squirrel distributes all weights and versions available at the github repo: https://github.com/vernnobile/OswaldFont

Google Fonts has chosen to only distribute the weights that are “finished”. Font Squirrel’s hope is that through hosting the fonts that aren’t perfect, it will encourage other font designers to continue his work.

Hope this helps!

Having the same problem with Oswald. The only “real” TTF versions are the non-italics.
MS Word, other non-typesetting programs will allow you to create a “fake” italics font.

However, when you attempt to use Oswald in anything professional (InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, etc.) The italics don’t show up because there are literally no italics. The TTF files that I have found that are labeled as italics are in actuality just the same non-oblique/non-italic fonts.

So, what you see on Google Fonts is all there is. (No italic versions of the letterforms). Sad to hear about Vernon Adams. Perhaps some kind soul on Font Squirrel will crank out some italic versions of it.

Several years ago, I downloaded Oswald from GitHub. It included both the roman and italic faces, which were genuine italic. The name visible in most director views does not say italic, but the actual font name does. Here are several screen snaps I made of Oswald in FontExplorer and two words and the Character panel from ID. Vernon Adams may have applied a simple skew to the glyphs when he created the italic fonts, but they are there in the font; they aren’t keyboard modifications of the glyphs.

I mean, I was able to get around the problem by skewing the text box in InDesign, but that’s not ideal.
The Italic versions of the fonts from GitHub for me won’t load up in Windows, the immediate problem is “more-or-less solved” for me, and I can run the job… but it would be nice to craft a properly-hinted italic version of Oswald & put it up there sometime.

Oh well. Maybe I now have a summer project?

I downloaded them from GitHub today. I downloaded all of them (v. 1.0 2.0. and 3.0). V. 3.0 has more fonts and they are in OTF format, which should work on Windows. Here’s the GitHub link (it’s Vernon Adams’ repository):