By "belong to the same family" do you mean like ITC Garamond, ITC Garamond italic,etc. My understanding is that fonts that are generated as a suite will come up as styles in a menu unless the naming convention is corrupt. If you simply have various individual versions of a font, even if they are of the same "cut" or foundry, this will not work unless you use something like FontLab to regenerate them as such and that would likely be a license violation.

Linotype has the habit of producing same-named fonts in two variants: "family-linked" and "single-linked". The single-linked fonts appear as separate families with just one style, while the family-linked fonts appear as multiple styles grouped under one family. The confusing thing is that the filenames of the fonts are the same so you need to be careful which fonts you actually install.

I don't know if any other vendor is doing this, but still, family grouping conventions definitely differ between font vendors.

Yeah, a lot of the fonts that appear as single fonts, but have the same family name are from Linotype and Fontfont. I think I've got at least 20 versions of Meta and Absara. I was hoping to condense them so I don't have to scroll through all of them, but maybe I'll just keep most of them deactivated. Thanks for the help! Any more advice would be greatly appreciated.

Slightly off-topic, but along the same line...

I'm working on an otf font family that contains Regular, Demi, Bold, ExtraBold and Black as well as their respective italics. Regular Italic, Bold and Bold Italic have their respective style flags set and those three plus Regular have their respective style names assigned.

Demi, ExtraBold and Black are grouped into "mini" families consisting of their regular and italic faces.

I have no problems with the fonts on a Mac. On a PC though, the font selector displays what to my mind is bizarre behaviour. (I freely admit that I'm an illegal alient on PCs. I have almost no idea of PC customs and practices...and should be deported back to Mac.)

In Notepad or Word, the font selector displays:
Afont (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Afont Demi (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Afont ExtraBold (bold, bold italic)
Afont Black (bold, bold italic)

I have no idea why the font selector displays 4 available styles for Demi, when there are only 2. (Selecting regular or bold seems to select the regular Demi face / selecting italic or bold italic seems to select the italic face.)

I expected the ExtraBold and Black to link to regular and italic styles... Does the font selector display the bold and bold italic styles because Windows actually uses the designated weight, rather than the style name?

Have I missed a setting that links font styles, or is style linking all done through the font family/subfamily (style) names?

I've read through FL's manual so many times my eyes are bleeding, but I still have probably missed something (it's hard to see through all that red). I've been scratching my head for so long and hard that I'm starting to look like, er, nick. If someone can point out what I've missed or point me to a manual page number, I'd sure appreciate it.

Later musings...
Maybe I'm expecting the "wrong" behaviour from MS apps' font selectors.

I thought if a single face font was installed, only a single style would be available in the font selector. Does the MS font selector display 4 available styles regardless of the number of actual fonts in a family installed...flushing out the styles with faux styles?

Sandy,
existing Windows GDI API has a limitation of only supporting up to four basic faces (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) per font family in its font selection logic. In addition, many applications allow one to apply additional algorithmic bold and italic simulation to a native font face. These factors contribute to what you are seeeing.

This is something we are working on improving. For example, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), a relatively new client programming platform built on top of .Net Framework, supports virtually unlimited number of font weight/width/slope combinations in a single font family, which allows an application built on top of WPF to present a single font family instead of four different ones in your example. Here is a relevant thread discussing this issue: http://typophile.com/node/33288

Best regards,
Mikhail Leonov
Microsoft

Thank you Mikhail. I'll take a look at it.

Mac type 1 fonts have a setting that prevents faux bold and/or faux italic. (It's still in the FontLab manual, but for the life of me, I can't find that actual screen.) That's the sort of thing I was looking for, so that if you create a font family, Afont Demi for instance, you can create regular and italic faces, and only have the regular and italic styles available -- not bold or bold italic (since no bold or bold italic faces exist).

Cheers
Sandy