How to modify the style property of a font on Windows?

Question

Note that this question continues from Is it possible to coax Visual Studio 2008 into using italics for comments?

If the long question t

Answer 1

Alright, I've successfully used FontForge to create a copy of Consolas (although this should work with any font) with the bold style actually being italics.

These are the steps that I followed:

• Install FontForge. It's a lot easier to do this on linux than on windows/cygwin. I used a Ubuntu VM ("sudo apt-get install fontforge").
• Open Consola.ttf (the "normal" style font) in FontForge.
• Select Element -> Font Info.
• Change the Fontname, Family Name, and Name for Humans, all to the same thing. I used 'ConsolasVS'.
• Click Ok. Click 'Yes' to let FontForge generate a new GUID for the font.
• Select File -> Generate Fonts. Make sure you've got "TrueType" selected. Uncheck "Validate before saving". Click Save.
• Now open Consolai.ttf (the italic style font) in FontForge.
• Go back to Element -> Font Info.
• Change the Font names as before, and where it currently says "Italic", change that to "Bold".
• Go to the OS/2 tab, change the font weight to "700 Bold".
• Go to the Mac tab, change the style set to Bold.
• Click Ok. Allow a new GUID to be generated again.
• File -> Generate Fonts, as before.

Copy your two new ttf files into your \Windows\FONTS\ folder.

You can now have nice italic comments with Consolas in VS2008. Hooray!