Tips

• It used to be that the italic version of a font was created by a font designer from scratch, while the oblique version was created by the computer, by simply slanting the letters, especially of sans-serif fonts, on the fly. This distinction has blurred somewhat, but generally holds.

• If you set the font style as italic and there is no italic style available, the browser should try to display the text as oblique.

  Figure 10.10. Palatino Linotype has a true italic font as you can see here in the third line. The letter a in particular is clearly not just slanted.

  

• One reason you might want to remove italics is to emphasize some text in a paragraph that has inherited italic formatting from a parent tag. For more details about inheritance, consult The Cascade: When Rules Collide on page 122.

• You can also use the i or em tags in the (X)HTML code to create italics. For details, see page 70.

• The font-style property is inherited.