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
    2020-08-19T00:51:11+00:00

    This really is another utterly ridiculous update problem arising from Microsoft. System works fine, Office no more annoying than usual, and bang, update to 16.40 and see this glitch that's impossible to fix.

    Reinstall typefaces and reboot? No go.

    Reinstall Office and reboot? No go.

    Spend an hour trying to track down the problem and get to hear that so many others are sharing the grief. But that's not competent software engineering practice.

    If you're not going to provide updates that function, don't keep annoying users with update notices in all the Office applications.

    I'm encouraging all my students and colleagues to move to LibreOffice. Yes, you lose some goodies -- but you also have something that doesn't break every time it gets updates.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T21:58:02+00:00

    Yeah I vaguely remembered it as user was telling me it failed.

    Well we have 3 examples of it not working that way now...

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T21:51:04+00:00

    Yeah, I saw that someone else had tried that and the same thing happened to them (the person on the stackexchange thread). It worked when he first opened Word, but after closing and relaunching it, the problem came back. Grrrr! 

    T

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T20:59:04+00:00

    Nevermind.  He re-opened Word and the issue returned.

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