I've a font consisting of 18 styles... it's in pfb as well as afm, pfm and inf format. I've not clue, which files I actually need, but I think the pfbs are the ones, because they have a preview :) Anyways, when trying to use them in Inkscape I see the list with all the different styles, right as one would expect, on selecting the font. However, the styles aren't rendered properly. Is it an Inkscape or an Pango bug? Abiword and OOo skrew up as well, but after all they can't handle that many styles anyway. Scribus doesn fine.
You can sometimes tell whether it's Pango or Inkscape by comparing the preview box in the text and font dialog with the actual rendering on the page. For weird reasons they happen to use completely different layout engines (although both eventually rely on Pango).
Generally, if the preview works but the page doesn't then it's my fault. If neither work then it's not.
Anyway, have a play around and if you still can't get it to work, file a bug with all the necessary files attached and a list of steps to reproduce the problem, assign it to me (cyreve) and I'll take a look.
Richard.