Bold vs Regular fonts about space-grotesk

[maximilian1001]

After hours of searching for reasons for the weird behaviour of MS Word, I finally found this! Word seems to handle the bold version of the font just right — until you export as a PDF. Then the fonts get mixed up, and all the bold parts get exported in regular font.
I edited SpaceGrotesk-Bold.ttf with FontForge so that it has its own unique font family name. Now "Space Grotesk Bold" shows up as a separate font in Word, and the export works just fine.
I see that many fonts have exactly this problem, and I'm not sure if this is a fault of the font-creators or of the software mixing up the fonts and styles.

[RandomMaerks]

As far as I know, the same name thing is intentional behaviour.

The Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic fonts are combined into one, named after the family name. There usually isn't a weight name assigned to them. Most many word processing software (namely MS Word) offer the 'Bold' and 'Italic' features, so you can press Ctrl+B to switch to bold type, Ctrl+I to switch to italic type, or both to switch to bold italic type.
If there is an italic version, other weights like Light or Black, along with their respective Italic companion, will also be combined. For example, '[FamilyName] Light' and '[FamilyName] Light Italic' are usually merged into '[FamilyName] Light' only, and the Italic can be enabled with Ctrl+I.
Of course, not all typefaces do this, but I think this is a common practice so that the user can switch between relative styles a little faster, and that the font menu is less crowded.

However, regarding the issue where only the Bold type is showing instead of the default Regular, it's either the word processing software's fault, a mistake in style naming, or an installation error.