Changing what "Bold" means using Gill Sans "light"

[Unsinkable2]

Hi, we use the Gill Sans font a lot in its “light” version. Unfortunately, Gill Sans’ “Bold” is flat out hideous, so we presently have to mark all text in need of emphasis manually using Format - Character - “SemiBold”. Ditto for “Italic” (should be “Light Italic”) and Bold Italic (should be SemiBold Italic).

Is there a way we can redefine what “Bold” means with respect to a font, so that selecting “Bold” will in effect choose “Semi bold” instead? At present we have a recorded macro (read: primitive solution), it would be good if there was a config somewhere where we could define what “normal”, “bold”, “italic” and “bolditalic” mean when used with this font - can anyone see how this could be done?

Our only alternative would be to have the font edited, but that means becoming incompatible with the rest of the world which runs counter to the reason we use LibreOffice in the first place

[horst]

How do you set “SemiBold”? I see only Regular. Bold, Italic and BoldItalic in the Format-Character.

[oweng]

Create a custom character style using the required weight of the font. The provided Emphasis character style uses bold by default. Perhaps create an “Emphasis Semi” character style?

[ROSt53]

Additionally to the excellent proposal by @oweng, you can assign a keyboard short cut to the new character style “Emphasis Semi”. Doing so you can create something like crtl+b => BOLD.

First create the style as described by @oweng; then do:
Tools > customize > tab: keyboard > category: styles > function: emphasis semi > and assign the key combination you like to use.

In my answer I just used @oweng’s proposal for the new style name “Emphasis Semi”. But you can choose any other name for the new style as well.