Anyone closely following this forum has likely seen some of my previous complaints how CorelDRAW fails to "see" all weights of a specific type family installed directly in Windows or stored in a folder referenced by Corel Font Manager. One of the frequent issues is italic weights of a typeface will be changed to upright or the upright weights will be cancelled out by the italic version.
The latest example of this bug is the new Coco Gothic Pro type family by Zetafonts. This type family is currently #1 in the Hot New Fonts list at the MyFonts website (and on sale until the end of this week). The package has 48 OpenType font files, 6 of which are Variable Fonts. The 42 standard OTFs work properly. However the variable fonts do not. The same conflict between Italic and Upright fonts is happening again. The primary Coco Gothic Pro Variable version and Alternate version can work slightly since at least one of the instances in the font list can actually load as italic. Then the desired weight can be adjusted manually via the variable weight slider. The Coco Gothic Pro Display Variable font only loads as italic. There is no work-around to get the upright weights to work. Meanwhile the whole type family works just fine in Adobe Illustrator and even Inkscape.There is something fundamentally wrong with how CorelDRAW is parsing font files for the fonts list. Some of the bugs are bad enough that they can affect how fonts are able to load in other applications if CorelDRAW is running. I've seen certain fonts have weights that are not visible in Adobe Illustrator's font menu if CorelDRAW is also running. If I shut down both applications and re-launch Illustrator the whole type family is visible once again. This nonsense has been going on for years.
Corel has a serious issue with font handling in DRAW and the CFM program and interlink with DRAW is a frigging mess. The variable font epiloug I believe had issues where some of the versions were recognized correctly but most italic versions were not. You could adjust those to be italic but what a mess.
I've been seeing these italic vs upright conflicts with a number of standard, non-variable fonts. Corel just needs to re-build the way CorelDRAW sees and loads fonts into the font menu. If other software vendors can get the fonts to show up correctly they should be able to manage it as well.
Corel does need to re-engineer the variable fonts interpolation engine in CorelDRAW. It does not work in a very smooth, stable manner. Even on my new Alienware X17 notebook the variable sliders are kind of laggy. The sliders do not work butter-smooth as they do in Adobe Illustrator. CorelDRAW really chokes when handling certain variable fonts. On an older system Monotype's Helvetica Now Variable font will nearly lock up the system when selecting the typeface or manually changing variable settings on the sliders. The lag isn't nearly as bad on my Alienware X17, but there is still some lag present. Over in Adobe Illustrator I see zero performance issues at all when using Helvetica Now Variable.