How to make Obsidian use the correct font variant?

I’m using Obsidian with the Minimal theme and the iA Writer Quattro V Font.

I just realized that Obsidian uses the “Regular” variant (just slanted) of the font for italic text although there is a separate “Italic” variant for this which looks much nicer:

2023-11-25 10_37_26-Complete Guide to iA Writer Quattro • Beautiful Web Type – Mozilla Firefox

Looking at the font settings under Appearance > Text Font I can only choose between these two options:

So I’m not sure if this is a problem with Obsidian, with the Minimal theme or the iA Writer Quattro font, so I need some advice.

How to convince Obsidian to use the “Regular” font variant for regular text and the “Italic” font variant for italic text?

On macOS, it looks like the PostScript name is iAWriterQuattroV-Regular so that’s what you’d type here and/or use in a CSS snippet. It should be similar on Windows, but can’t verify that at the moment.

Oh, I don’t have trouble getting the Regular font to work.

But you should see in your test the way you set it up now that italic text is just a slanted Quattro regular instead of Quattro italic.

Hm.

It appears the italic style is being applied correctly here on my end:

Okay, so this may be a Windows issue with variable fonts (I was using the mac until now in my previous screenshots) or the actual font files themselves. I know Quattro has the wrong font weights, and that doesn’t seem to have been fixed. I noticed that issue when installing Quattro on iOS a while ago.

Windows 10 won’t let me install both iAWriterQuattroV.ttf and iAWriterQuattroV-Italic.ttf for whatever reason. iAWriterQuattroV.ttf will install, but when installing iAWriterQuattroV-Italic.ttf, the regular version is removed (and neither show up in the Fonts list).

I’d try installing the static versions to see if you have any better luck with those.

Thanks so much for taking the time to check this out!

I just installed the Static version (which runs as iA Writer Quattro S) and it works right out of the box (but only after rebooting Windows, Obsidian didn’t recognize the font even after restarting the app). Looks so much better now.

Also thanks for the hint about font weights, that was another thing that drove me crazy…

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