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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?

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  • I take it that these are fonts you've created or edited/modified yourself? If you could let us know what font it is and how it was created maybe we could help further. Aug 31, 2012 at 6:28
  • The font family is "Thirsty script", and it's downloaded, I didn't create it. Aug 31, 2012 at 11:17
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    you can try contacting the font designer for advice ( yellowdesignstudio.com/fonts )
    – horatio
    Aug 31, 2012 at 19:57

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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.

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    I created a custom font with three weights for a client. We had a lot of trouble with Adobe apps not seeing the full family. Turned out to be some kind of font caching conflict between OSX and Adobe (this was about five years ago). I wrote an AppleScript that solved it by trashing a hidden cache file. In the end, I just gave each weight it's own family name to make it easy. Dec 29, 2012 at 22:29

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