AppleMatt said:I at no point have said that people should never use them
OK OK, I had just hoped that there was some reasoning behind your advising the CompUser to go against 15 years of practice in computer based typography.AppleMatt said:stay away from any font that is named "font bold", "font narrow", "font black" etc - style it yourself
And there is, paradoxically, an instance where choosing the style is the best thing to do: That's when you are using a complex font family like Futura on the Mac and you know you are transferring the job to a Windows machine which is incapable of displaying all of the variations -- in that case Adobe recommends instead of choosing Futura Heavy, you choose Futura Medium and bold it, because Futura Heavy doesn't exist as an option on the Windows machine. This is an OS limitation however, and requires detaild knowledge of how the fonts map to each other.
Here's what Olav Kvern has to say
http://www.itcfonts.com/ulc/article.asp?nCo=AFMT&sec=ulc&issue=26.2.1&art=digwemust4
"If you’re ... using a Macintosh, select the name of the font you want from the type menu. If you want to use Helvetica Bold, choose “B Helvetica Bold.” Again, don’t use your desktop typesetting program’s type-style shortcuts."