This Microsoft Whitepaper analyses the constrains that need to be applied to font styles for them to be usable in apps: http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-components-postattachments/00-02-24-90-36/WPF-Font-Selection-Model.pdf Any font style that fits the WWS rules documented there absolutely needs to be handled by GTK font dialogs (not only n b i bi) Anything else is broken, but there are lots of broken legacy stuff out there. The graceful way to deal with it is to repair font/style name using the kind of heuristics MS suggested and implemented in WPF, but that needs to happen lower in the stack (probably at the fontconfig level)