Identify Bold, Italic fonts

Font specifications state that "fsSelection" bits in "OS/2" table (or "macStyle" bits in "head" table) determine whether the font was designed with features like "Italic", "Bold" etc.

"fsSelection" bits ->
Bits 0 & 5 can be used to determine if the font was designed with these features or whether some type of machine simulation was performed on the font to achieve this appearance.

Bit 0 -> Italic if set as 1
Bit 5 -> Bold if set as 1

Vista Meiryo font Italic feature

Font Meiryo introduced in Microsoft Vista is very interesting, It only has Italic glyphs for Latin, Greek, Coptic, and Cyrillic characters. Following image shows that only latin glyphs are slanted when Italic property is applied. WOW!
The top row shows italized text.


In Windows Vista, Meiryo is distributed as two TrueType Collection files, with regular and bold glyphs stored in separate files. Each file also contains an italic variant of the font.

Glyph Shapes in Windows XP vs Vista

In JIS X 0213:2004, the standard shapes of some glyphs are modified. Glyph shape of “MS Gothic” in XP differs that from in Vista. The version of msgothic.ttc,msmincho.ttc is 2.3 on XP, but 5.0 in Vista. Font version 2.5 and 5.0 includes both old "1990" shape and new "2004" shape.

Font version 2.3 – have only old “1990” shapes. (XP’s default)
Font version 2.5 – have both “1990” and “2004” shapes and “1990” shapes as default.
Font version 5.0 – have both “1990” and “2004” shapes and “2004” shapes as default. (Vista’s default)

New font “Meiryo” has only version 5.0 up-to-date.