Thanks to everyone who participated in the investigation and shared the information on the workaround.
I remember using the dedicated folder, it was a general answer to many font-realted problems back then... It’s been several years since I heard about this method having its use still. Glad it works.

Greetings from the person who made the HEX Franklin font family.

The original poster, Charlie, reached out to me about this issue, and after a long time doing some debugging with Frank Grießhammer from the Adobe Type team, we figured out what the issue is. I've already updated Charlie about this separately but I figured I would post a comment here in case other people come looking for info on the same bug.

Here's the situation …

There is a new bug that breaks how some variable fonts work in Adobe apps. The fonts may not show in the font menu at all, and if they do show, selecting them either results in a blank text field or a fallback to another font.

The issue is apparently tied to how Adobe apps and CoolType's font picking mechanisms interact with the latest versions of macOS. It seems to be affecting CFF-flavored variable fonts specifically. (I was somewhat relieved to find it wasn't just my own fonts that were affected due to some error on my part, because it also affects Adobe’s own fonts – e.g. the CFF/OTF version of Source Serif 4 Variable also suffers from the same issue.)

Frank reports that some Adobe engineers have addressed the issue already, so it should hopefully be fixed in their future app updates.

In the mean time, it's possible to work around this issue by installing the affected fonts into the Adobe-specific fonts folders instead of macOS's system fonts folders (as described here: https://glyphsapp.com/learn/testing-your-fonts-in-adobe-apps ). Fonts in those folders don't seem to be affected by the bug.

Thanks to Frank for helping me figure this out. And also thanks to the Charlie for reporting the issue in the first place!

I'm hoping the fixed version of the Adobe apps will be available for Creative Cloud subscribers soon.

Hi Zachary. Yes, that is the fix at the moment. I contacted HEX Projects, and they recommended putting the variable version in the Root library font folder. It is easy to put the font files in the wrong library folder, like the user library folder.

On Mac, the best way to get to the Root library folder is to press Cmd-Shift-G (in Finder) and paste the path /Library/Application Support/Adobe/ into the Go to Folder dialog. If there is no Fonts folder at that location, then create one. After doing that, it worked for me. Thanks!

This is probably because of a particular known bug that happens if the font is system installed and you are on macOS 15.4. If you put the font into /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts then it should work.

I'll let HEX Projects know about the issue and see if they have a fix. Thanks for your help, Egor!

I see, thanks. The problem is that it’s behind the paywall, so it won’t be easy to test :(
Have you informed HEX Projects team about the issue you are having? Perhaps something in the font doesn’t conform the specs fonts require... I am passing this to the fonts team, but I think this should be pulled from both sides. Thanks!

Thanks for responding Egor! This is a link to the font I'm using:

https://www.future-fonts.com/hex/hex-franklin

Specifically version 0.3 of the font build.

Thanks!
Charlie

Charlie, can you share the link to this specific version of the font you are having?