Testing in TextEdit.
Bold is linked to Regular and it works fine.
SemiBold is linked to Light, but when activated, it picks Bold instead. “Unbolding” gives me Regular instead of original Light.
I just tested this. I can reproduce the problem in TextEdit. The fonts work fine in Windows, through. We have to have a deeper look into this.
Same thing with Pages.
Of cause as they use the same text engine.
Actually, Pages doesn’t use the Cocoa text system. It’s their own implementation. So, TextEdit and Pages sometimes support different features, e.g., Pages won’t show contextual fractions, whereas TextEdit will.
Personally, I only bold-link the regular and the bold. App behavior just becomes unpredictable otherwise.
But I need this because of the way I intend to release and price the font:
Thin
Light-SemiBold
Normal-Bold
Black
So in Windows it should work fine?
P.S. It works in InDesign
“But I need this because of the way I intend to release and price the font…”
Most users don’t expect fonts to be linked this way. Because aside from type designers nobody actually understands style linking or weight relationships. And as was noted above, it doesn’t always work right. You might be better off just linking the regular/bold weights.
You’d have to use the styleMapFamilyName parameter and set it to “MyFontName Light” in Light and SemiBold. But DTF is right, I cannot recommend investing too much time into that. You cannot predict or influence the way an application will handle it. It has even happened before that fonts did not show up at all in Windows menus because of too complicated style-linking.
One thing you need to know. If you style like Light and Semibold, Windows users will never the the semibold. It is only available by selecting the light and hit the B button.
On the other hand, if the user has a text with bold style applied to some words, if he selects the light style and there is no style linking, he will get fake bolds. Still most people I spoke with tend to only link Regular and Bold.