🚀 go-pugleaf

> When properly named, the only variants that aren't listed by Windows apps are specifically Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic, because
applications provide buttons for them.

True up to XP, but not so for Vista. But I don't see what you're getting at - this point hasn't been in dispute.

> MS Office applications, ... let you use the Bold and Italic buttons even if the appropriate font file is absent, producing a typographically disgusting faux bold and a terrible oblique, respectively.

I don't know about all the apps you cite, but in Word you can tell when the font is being faked by checking the info in the font dialogue (in my old version, it says the font style is being imitated for display). DTP apps I've used in Windows typically grey out options for unavailable variants in font dialogues. But faux fonts are a Windows-only phenomenon, so I don't really see the relevance of this either.

>My point was that if you have fonts that are not named properly for PC use (they are NOT rampant, but they DO exist).

Then to my mind you should have used a real example in your discussion - an example of a font from a professional foundry.

> And you really need to use that font in MS Word. Then the ONLY solution is to rename the family names.

No, it's not the only solution. You just select the font through the font dialogue. Please give us an example where it's simply not possible to access a font in Windows without editing the font name. Sure, not all variants will appear under the family name (even in Vista), but they are all accessible. If someone doesn't know how to selct a font variant in Windows, I certainly wouldn't send them off to edit that font.