Does the name of the Weight dropdown in the instances matter?

Those weight names in the dropdown in the instance tab in Font Info, does that get export and read in any apps, or is it just to provide a name for the weight value?

The weight dropdown controls the weight class.

so even though it say Light, bu the style is called Thin, there won’t be a conflict anywhere?

Look, we cannot predict the totality of all software that is ever going to use fonts, but weightClass and style name are two different things.

The name suggestions in the weightClass popup menu come from the spec, and there is software that tries to interpret the style names rather than read the weightClass number. The macOS implementation tries that, and unsuccessfully so, because menu order on the Mac has become unpredictable because of it.

MS Office sorts the style names alphabetically and to my knowledge ignores the weightClass values.

Adobe software uses the weightClass value for sorting the menu entries.

I deem Adobe’s approach the best one in this case. More info in the Naming tutorial.

I see. My question is whether those name suggestions are actually going to be rendered or called in some environment so that it would be confusing if a font whose style name was Thin was using a “Light” weightClass.

No. Only the number that you see next to the dropdown will be written to the font.

1 Like