Accessing Helvetica Oblique and Courier Oblique

From NeoWiki

Believe it or not, there are no such fonts as “Helvetica Oblique” or “Courier Oblique” (as the italic variants of these fonts are known) on Mac OS X; check Font Book if you don't believe us. Nevertheless, Apple somehow allows its applications to have access to these mythical font faces (and a few other applications have figured it out, too), so people want to use “Helvetica Oblique” and “Courier Oblique” in NeoOffice, too.

If you click on the "italic" button in the toolbar, nothing will happen to your Helvetica or Courier text. However, if you import a RTF file saved in TextEdit, you'll notice the Helvetica or Courier text appears oblique where you specified “Helvetica Oblique” or “Courier Oblique” in TextEdit. This gives us a clue about how to force “Helvetica Oblique” or “Courier Oblique” when desired.

N.B. Beginning with Mac OS X 10.5, Apple has changed how the font functions that NeoOffice uses work, and these functions now return the bold and oblique versions of Helvetica and Courier (despite the fact there are still no physical fonts for these faces), so the work-arounds below are no longer necessary.

Helvetica

• Type the text you desire to italicize
• Select it
• Manually change the font in the "Font" drop-down from "Helvetica" to "Helvetica-Oblique" or "HelveticaOblique", or to "Helvetica-BoldOblique" for bold oblique text, by typing the desired font name.

  Using the bold button on text in "Helvetica-Oblique" will also produce bold oblique text.

Courier

• Type the text you desire to italicize
• Select it
• Manually change the font in the "Font" drop-down from "Courier" to "Courier-Oblique" or "CourierOblique" by typing the desired font name.
• Press the Italic button on the toolbar.

  Using the bold button on text in "Courier-Oblique" will also produce bold oblique text.