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.
Font embedding is irrelevant to the issue I'm describing. The problem I have is at the design stage, when I am just trying to select a specific weight of a typeface to use when actually designing something. CorelDRAW is refusing to give me access to all the weights of a typeface I have installed in the system. I work in the sign industry, so using type is pretty important for my work.For example, if I sync the Factoria type family (by Fort Foundry) from Adobe Fonts not all 16 weights will be available. Only the 8 upright weights can be selected. You'll see all 16 weights of the type family listed in the font menu. But the 8 italic weights are replaced with duplicates of the upright weights. So you really only get access to 8 of the fonts. If I want to use that type family fully I have to do so using a different application, such as Adobe Illustrator. The type family works correctly over there.I've run into similar problems with other type families and have seen the issue repeated in every way how fonts can be installed or reference in CorelDRAW, whether they're installed directly into the Windows Fonts folder, installed in the system using Corel Font Manager, placed into a folder referenced by Corel Font Manager or synced via the Adobe Fonts Service. Something is wrong with the way how CorelDRAW organizes fonts into the font menu. This issue with the Coco Gothic Pro type family and its six variable fonts is just the latest example of this ongoing and un-addressed problem.By the way, I've seen these font handling errors in CorelDRAW repeated dependably on multiple desktop systems at my workplace, my retired old Dell XPS notebook computer and its replacement, an Alienware X17. It is definitely a bug in CorelDRAW and not anything I'm doing wrong on my end.