A month or so ago, I was working in Typst and I noticed that Crimson Text had no small caps (smcp). Odd since Crimson Text has small caps.
Turns out, I downloaded Crimson Text from Google Fonts and when you do that you often get a font that has been optimized to be downloaded by a browser on page load. Optimizing often entails removing features and glyphs (subsetting) to reduce the file size.
I assumed incorrectly that Google only reduces sizes for files that are served via the API and that clicking Get Font would allow you to download the full font.
In the case of Crimson Text, the git repository is available at skosch/Crimson, but when google wanted to release it, they forked the repo at googlefonts/Crimson and made changes including this one, which removes smcp from the ttf version of the font. Google only offers the ttf version of fonts.
I emailed the author of that commit to learn more, and she kindly replied and informed me about Google intentionally removing features and glyphs to reduce size and suggested I download fonts from the repositories instead.
I like the UI of Google Fonts. It allows me to quickly get information about fonts and trust that they are up to date (which is wrong too). I’m a bit disappointed that it’s not a good idea to download fonts for Desktop/offline use from Google Fonts, but at least I know now. And now you do too!