Comment 32 for bug 344814

PS and PDF do not support synthetic fonts. To get synthetic bold when printing we need to embed the synthetic font outlines. GDI does provide the synthetic outlines (via GetGlyphOutline). I have not done any testing to check if FreeType provides the synthetic outlines (via FT_Outline_Decompose).

If FreeType does provide the outlines then it is just a case of forcing the fallback path in cairo when the font is synthetic. With FreeType fonts this is easy as we can check for the CAIRO_FT_OPTIONS_EMBOLDEN flag. On GDI this is harder as I don't know of any way to test if GDI is synthesising a font.

See also:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21543