If the font variant (or combination) does not exist, some renderers generate a "fake" font.
- For bold, they may take the regular font and make it thicker.
- For italic, they may "tip" or "slant" the letters slightly right.
- For smallcaps, they may shrink ALL CAPS instead.
As an example, see these articles showing:
Real vs. Fake Smallcaps
https://techstacker.com/fake-small-c...al-small-caps/
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questi...xetex-fontspec
(Real smallcap fonts have slightly thicker letters, so they blend in with regular text. ALL CAPS shrunk down becomes too thin, so they look much lighter than surrounding text.)
Real vs. Fake Italics
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange....ustrator/42413
(In many fonts, real italics are usually more "cursive". The fake ones are just slanted.)
Real vs. Fake Bold
https://css-tricks.com/watch-your-font-weight/
* * *
Side Note: These are also called "faux" or or "artificial" or "synthetic" fonts.
For more information, also read the fantastic
"CSS Fonts Module Level 4". They give lots of examples + show comparisons + explain in detail.
For example:
Quote:
2.2.2. Missing weights
Quite often there are only a few weights available for a particular font family. When a weight is specified for which no face exists, a face with a nearby weight is used. In general, bold weights map to faces with heavier weights and light weights map to faces with lighter weights. [...]
Most user agents model a font as having a particular weight which often corresponds to one of the numbers in the nine-step scale described above. While this is true of most fonts, some fonts might be configurable so as to support a range of weights. In this situation, the user agent uses a face with a weight as close as possible to the weight requested [...].
Although the practice is not well-loved by typographers, bold faces are often synthesized by user agents for families that lack actual bold faces.
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And especially read
"5.2. Matching font styles", which describes each step in extreme detail.
Long story short:
Some programs look for an exact matching/existing font, and if it doesn't exist, will fallback to Regular (or closest thing). (Like ADE not supporting or displaying
font-variant: small-caps.)
Other programs like Word/LibreOffice will generate artificial combinations if the font doesn't exist. (Like small-caps -> shrunken ALL CAPS... or if you choose some odd combination like: bold+italic+smallcaps font, it may take the bold+italic font which
does exist, convert to ALL CAPS, then shrink.)