Comment 18 for bug 595432

This probably won't add much to the discussion since we're probably the only ones using Pango, but I did a quick comparison against LibreOffice Writer & Scribus to see how they handle these things. With Inkscape Arial Black (when chosen through the T&F dialog) has two variants, neither one is "Regular", we just have Italic & Bold Italic (which appear the same visually). LibreOffice by default outputs a "Regular" Arial Black and lets you apply Italic to it, and if you add Bold as well it doesn't change visually. Scribus on the other hand only lists "Regular" as a variant.

A) Inkscape can't do Arial Bold as Regular
B) Scribus can't do Arial Bold as anything but Regular
C) LibreOffice Writer doesn't show variants that I'm aware of but can at least achieve both of what Inkscape and Scribus can.