Cursor disappears (only) over the italic texts (on PC)

I've just started encountering this bug having moved from a Lenovo laptop with two external screens to a Surface with two external screens. The Surface has a retina (to use Apple's term) screen, the external screens are non-retina. On the Surface screen when the cursor goes over italic text it halves in size, becoming much finer, as though it's forgetting to use the pixel-doubled version. If that is replicated on the non-retina screen, presumably it would disappear. 

Probably related: on both the retina and non-retina screens when I put the arrow cursor into the left margin to get the right-pointing line-selection arrow cursor, it halves in size - I can see it, though, because it's so much chunkier than the I-beam pointer. 

Oddly enough I didn't encounter this on the Lenovo, which also has a retina screen built-in (but with non-retina external screens). 

It seems that Word forgets to use the retina version of its custom pointers, and can't tell if it's on a pixel-doubled screen or not. Goes along with Windows' pretty uneven handling of pixel-doubled screens, but really should have been identified and fixed if the longevity of this forum post is anything to go by. 

Edit: And, in fact, I find now that the little mickey-mouse gloved hand pointer for links is half-sized in Outlook. Seems it might be an office-wide problem.

Hi guys,

Your MS Word is working fine, although the pointer in italics is almost invisible, c´est la vie with word as it is now.

However, the issue here is that Word uses its own pointer when you are on the page, so none of the changes that you make in the pointer selection in windows changes the cursor in Word, so it is useless to do this, as so many people on line ineffectually advise online.

You can see this if you move the mouse pointer on and off the page in Word you can see how the pointer changes, outside the page to whatever selection you made for windows, to a small white arrow cursor on the page.

The only thing that worked for me,  just to mitigate but not solve the problem, is to adjust the blink rate of the cursor in Ease of Access - Keyboard (not mouse) section; just play with the blinking rate from none to fast to see which one is better for you, for me it was better to adjust to None.

Also, the problem with the pointer/cursor was worse only when the scale and layout for apps in windows was set to 100% (I like it this way - smaller but neater). If I setup the scale 10 150%, when fitting the word page into 100% or so, the pointer/cursor on the page over the italicized text was much more visible.

I guess Microsoft should correct this by adjusting the pointer that MS Word and Excel use when on the page.

I hope this will help you.

Thanks, I haven't tried that fix. I can reliably get it back with a reboot. 

BUT: if I were a programmer working on this, that fix would be a clue, I think. 

In my case the bug is triggered when I click on a hyperlink in an email in Outlook, in cases where the hand mouse icon appears to have shrunk. So, I bet it's something with some variable that rescales cursors being set, and that the italics cursor in Microsoft word doesn't handle rescaling properly, and the custom scaling forces a reset.

That's a bet.

My other bet is no one is working on this. Software is getting to the point where it is too complex, and leads to unexpected results, in some subset of cases. And nobody gives a damn if it ruins your particular life, b/c there are millions of other users who are not affected.

Hi Steven,

In your previous post, you've mentioned that you just updated Office 365 to the latest version which is 1701. There's a difference between the latest version and latest update. You can get the latest version by upgrading a program. Upgrade means uninstalling the existing file and installing a new one. While Update means applying changes and new patches to the existing file on your machine.

We recommend following the steps above given by Lawrence Lib to install the latest update on your device.

Get back to us with the outcome so we can help you out further.

Hi Steven,

We understand that you're having issues with the cursor on your Word 2016. Since you mentioned that repairing the Office didn't work, we recommend that you install the latest Office update as this can resolve the issue.

We are eager on getting this resolved for you, we will wait for your feedback.