I’m mostly asking whether this is a known issue or not. I couldn’t find any bug reports, but it seems like a pretty significant problem to me. It is possible that I’m just bad at searching, so I’m asking here instead.
Google fonts, if I understand it correctly, provide static fonts that are autogenerated from their variable weight font, and as result the glyphs are usually made of several overlapping components. Many applications have slight issues rendering them, but Google insists they are correct and in a font editor they seem to be.
3D text however gets completely broken when using them. Some components or their overlaps do not get filled, so there are only their outlines (which are invisible unless the text is extruded, so parts of glyphs are simply missing). Blender also seemingly sometimes incorrectly identifies which side of the component’s edges are outside and which are inside. This means that after using the “offset” parameter, individual components get thicker instead of thinner and vice versa, and parts of glyphs that should be empty get filled.
Workaround: The fonts (not sure if all of them) should have a separate version in their subsection of the Google fonts Github, which looks identical except all the glyphs are made of a single component. These versions work fine (only checked the Comfortaa font, but it should apply to all of them). The issue is that it can take a long time to find out about this solution because neither Google nor Blender tells you about this.
Here’s what I mean. I can only add one picture as a new user, so I’m adding the extruded version since I think it makes the issue most obvious.
