OTF font family styles not showing up in Photoshop

Question

I have a font which has six styles (Black, Bold, Extra bold, Light, Medium and Regular). For each style there's an OTF file. If I install all the OTF files, the font shows up properly in the Fonts panel in Windows, it shows as a family so that if I double click it, then another window appears with each style.

However, in Photoshop, when I choose the font, only the "Regular" style appears in the style menu, which is grayed out, and does not let me choose any other style.

I've been twiddling with FontCreator and some other font-related software, trying to properly set up the options for each style, with no luck.

So the question would be this: how should I edit the parameters in the fonts so they keep being from the same family but Photoshop recognizes each style, just like Windows does?

Answer 1

Font families that you download from major vendors should be configured to "just work" in Windows.

I wrote a reply, but then did some more research and realised I was all wrong.

Inside your font files is a "family name" which is the same for an entire family of fonts. So all four Times New Roman fonts (roman, bold, italic, and bold italic) share the same "family name" of "Times New Roman". Problem is, Windows only traditionally allows four fonts per family, including two weights, and slanted (italic or oblique) versions of these weights.

So font families with more than two weights need to have different values for "family name" for each weight (although the "book" and "bold" weight may still share a family name).

Now, for some reason, some windows applications may be able to cope with more fonts in the same family and it'll work, but many won't. So it's safer to give everything except the "regular" and "bold" weights their own family name, ie "MyFont Extra Bold" as part of the family name.