Let me tell you a story of Poor Richard
Poor Richard is the font that was used for a lot of the titling in the William Hope Hodgson series of books.

Poor Richard was distributed under lisence with some miccrosloth app, or another, so at some point, I had a legit version of it, and decided to use it for the Hodgson.

When laying out the book in Page Maker, I "bolded" this font... Pagemaker was an old school program that committed the typographic sin of, when a "true" bold version of a particular font doesn't actually exist, it creates a "false bold."

I've since upgraded to InDesign -- InDesign does NOT create "false bolds" because false bolds are an abomination before the eyes of the typography gods. And any "modern" font should have a bold version available, so one should NEVER need to create false bolds.


I really really really don't want to layout Hodgson Volume 5 in Pagemaker. Pagemaker is kind of stodgy and sucky, and it will take twice as long, and then I'll have to do it MYSELF because Ross doesn't know how to use pagemake -- Ross knows how to use InDesign. SO... I'd like to use indesign.

To do so, I need a copy of a "REAL" version of Poor Richard Bold, which I don't have. Or I need to figure out what kind of magic "make it wider, make it taller make it outline.. whatever" that pagemaker did, so I can manually create a "bold" style in Indesign that approximates what Pagemaker did automagicallly.

So... how does one, using standard typographic tools such as "fatter, taller, outline/whatever", does one create a false bold? My google foo has defeated me on this one. All I come up with are religious tracts explaining why false bolds are abomination, and anyone who considers them are apostate.

Or... conversely, if anybody wanted to email me a poor richard bold file, I'd be in your debt forever.

Yours in DTP hell.

-Jeremy

PS this isn't nearly as bad as the time when Adobe Acrobat 4 refused to embed my old school fonts into the Wellman layouts, because adobe had defined a new licensing bit in font files that was said to indicate weather the font could be embedded or not. Except of course all the freeware fonts created before this new standard had the embed bit set to no be default, because the descriptor bit wasn't defined when the font was created. So my font that I could embed under acrobat v. 3 could not no longer be embbeded. So when my printer required that I send in files using the new version of acrobat, I couldn't create the files. I searched for two days before I found a little command line utility that allowed me to flip the bit on my font, and embed it, and get a print quality PDF off to my printer... two days late. I still treasure this little app, and it has saved my ass more then once. (I wonder where I archived it... hmmmm... This is important because adobe sent its author a cease and desist DMC letter, saying that it violated their copy protection schemes and was thus illegal and creating or distributing it would result in his being brought up on criminal charges, etc., even though it had perfectly acceptable non-copy protection circumvention uses... liking allowing me to embed my freeware JEEPNY font into my damn wellman PDFs!)

Grrrr.

PPS
Clearly the reason I'm facing this problem is because Hodgson 5 has entered production. Please don't ask when its going to be out, because that answer is directly releated to how quickly someone sends me POOR RICHARD BOLD!