Styles for some typeface families not showing up correctly

[BrianT]

I haven't gone through my entire collection yet, but I've noticed this problem specifically with two families: Bahnschrift and Cascadia Code. Both happen to be Microsoft typefaces included in Windows 10, though other Microsoft typefaces are fine. Photo 1.8.4.674 and all previous betas I've tried exhibit the same behaviour. Despite the typeface offering several styles (light, condensed, bold, black, italic, etc.), all styles show up as "Regular". Photo seems to know that there is more than one style, and it gets the count correct (e.g., there are indeed 15 styles for Bahnschrift and 6 styles for Cascadia Code). Selecting any of the styles just results in the Regular one being chosen.

Photo seems to be the only software that is confused here. Everything else I tried, whether it be Microsoft software like Notepad or Paint, or Adobe Photoshop, or ShareX (my screenshot tool), or Firefox or Brave, etc. are all able to see and apply the different styles. So what's different about these two typefaces that are causing problems with Photo?

It doesn't look like Microsoft provides a separate download for Bahnschrift, but you can get Cascadia Code at https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code

[Alfred]

Like Bahnschrift, Cascadia Code (or at least the most recent version of it) is a variable font. The Affinity apps don’t yet support this relatively new font technology.

[BrianT]

26 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Like Bahnschrift, Cascadia Code (or at least the most recent version of it) is a variable font. The Affinity apps don’t yet support this relatively new font technology.

Ah, so that's the difference! Pretty cool technology: https://v-fonts.com/

I don't expect Photo to ever have full support for variable fonts (that would be more of a Designer or Publisher thing), but it would be nice to at least be able to access the predefined styles. I see this issue was raised four years ago already.