Word now only recognizing the bold font of my Adobe Pro typefaces--Powerpoint and Excel work as expected

Anonymous
2020-08-17T03:45:00+00:00

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone can help me with a weird thing where two of my Adobe Pro fonts stopped working properly in Word. This is occurring both on my 365 account on my home computer (iMac Pro) and my Office 2019 license (MacBook Pro 13" 2017) on my work computer. Both are running the latest Catalina (10.15.6). I only just noticed the problem in the last few days. So I don't know if it was a recent Microsoft update or what. Everything was working well before I went on vacation at the end of August [edit: I meant end of July].

The two affected typesets are Adobe Garamond Pro and Adobe Caslon Pro. Long story short, the version of Word on my 365 subscription (16.40 20081000) and my Volume License 2019 (16.40 20081000 & and on the most recent prior version of 16.39) both are acting as if I only have Adobe Garamond Pro (and Adobe Caslon Pro) bold on my system. So all my text is now bold. Word is able to see that I have regular, italic, and semibold (as it lists them as part of my fonts), but when I try to manually select regular, italic, or semibold it ignores my request and still shows only bold (with a checkmark next to it indicating that I have selected bold). No matter what I do, it only allows me to select bold for those typefaces. Other typefaces seem to work fine, though I admit I have not tested them all. 

Importantly, this problem does not occur with Powerpoint or Excel. When using those applications, the Adobe typefaces work as expected. Those applications see that I have regular, italic, and semibold and it lets me choose among them. Same when I use the Apple Pages application. Everything works as expected there.

Anywho, Adobe Garamond Pro is my go-to typeface for work, and so now I'm in a pickle. 

I'd appreciate any help you might be able to offer in tracking this problem down.

Best,

Tomas

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2020-08-27T14:36:11+00:00

I just launched Word on my work laptop and it was still exhibiting the problem even though this computer already had the new Adobe Acrobat Reader update. BUT, I then launched Acrobat and asked it to read a PDF that had Adobe Garamond Pro as the typeface. It loaded up fine in Acrobat of course. I then quit Acrobat and launched Word and Garamond Pro started working on this computer too! So MAKE SURE YOU LAUNCH ACROBAT on your computer, as RebCran indicated. I'm not sure if Garamond Pro must be in the PDF you launch, but that's what worked for me.

Tomas

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-08-22T02:27:41+00:00

    Tomas, this exact thing happened to me today (even those precise two fonts, Adobe Caslon Pro and Adobe Garamond Pro).

    I posted a thread about it: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-word-only-showing-bold-andor-bold-italic/5181f16d-874f-4add-937b-fa4353c687f4

    The only thing that worked for me was to open FontBook and delete all versions of those two fonts *except* for Regular and Italics. In other words, if you delete Bold, Semibold, Bold Italics, etc., and then restart Word, you will be able to use the regular versions of those two fonts. 

    However, this is clearly just a temporary work-around, not a long-term solution. I am very curious to learn why this is happening to people.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-20T21:34:00+00:00

    On this thread, concerned with the standard Garamond font but the same issue, the solution/workaround is to downgrade to Word 16.34 (available on this page; direct download link here) – remember to switch off autoupdates after installing the older version!

    Can confirm this has been working for me and the Adobe Caslon/Garamond Pro fonts since reverting to 16.34 and binning the newer version.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-08-19T20:42:09+00:00

    Here's an interim fix (and just reinstalling a prior version of Word won't do the job – I tried with both Word for version 16.39 and the entire Office package for version 16.38), though it may take an hour or two (depending upon the size of your Outlook backup file, your computer, broadband connection, and hard drive speed):

    1. Back up all of Outlook (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/export-items-to-an-archive-file-in-outlook-for-mac-281a62bf-cc42-46b1-9ad5-6bda80ca3106), as well as any normal.dot templates you may have spent hours perfecting (with macros, page sizes, etc).
    2. Uninstall all of MS Office/Office 2016/Office 365 (see instructions at <https://faq.oit.gatech.edu/content/uninstall-office-2016-mac>)
    3. Reboot (yep, reboot – remember, we're working with Microsoft apps)
    4. Reinstall with the Microsoft_Office_16.35.20030802_BusinessPro_Installer package (available down the page as the March 10, 2020 package on <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac#:~:text=Release%20history%20for%20Office%20for%20Mac%20%20,Outlook%2C%20OneNot%20...%20%2016%20more%20rows%20>)
    5. Import all your Outlook files back, and copy over all your normal.dot templates into their usual spaces.
    6. Things should be back to the pre-16.40 functionality with respect to Adobe typefaces.

    The Adobe opentype fonts (Adobe Garamond Pro, Adobe Caslon Pro, etc) are working correctly again, and this is the first version of Office 2016 for MacOS that offers Dictate. It remains utterly ridiculous that Microsoft can't handle its updates any more reliably than they do. Like many, if I didn't have to use MS products for the job (management has a new love for Teams, for example), I wouldn't.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-08-19T13:44:16+00:00

    I'm having the same issue.  Tried clearing the font cache using Onyx, deleting and reinstalling Adobe Caslon, and no luck.  It's maddening because most of my documents (used as camera-ready copy for teaching purposes) are in Adobe Caslon and will now have to be reformatted in another font.

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