Up to now, we've been using the excellent Gentium Plus fonts for our dictionary website, and they're working well; they're attractive and cover all the glyphs we need.

However, GentiumPlus comes only in regular and italic flavours; there's no bold version of the font. When we use "bold" on the website, the browser renderer automatically fattens-up the regular font to give the impression of bold; it's not particularly pretty, but it works. Unfortunately, that can't be done when generating the PDF. Neither Apache FOP nor the commercial XEP generator we use has the capability of automatically generating a bold version of a font from a regular version (and they would presumably argue that it shouldn't be done, because it's ugly, and would be especially noticeably so in print). So we're faced with three choices in the print dictionary:

• Eschew bold text altogether. This is not ideal, because dictionary entries depend for their readability on the textual differentiation of lots of information bits which appear next to each other.
• Choose a different font, one which has both bold and italic variants, for the whole dictionary.
• Choose a different font only for bits of the text which need to be bold.

We'll have to think carefully about this. I've written to the team for thoughts and suggestions.