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
    2020-08-23T11:44:16+00:00

    I'm having the same problem on PowerPoint (Mac) and LeagueGothic font. Open up a PP and title font goes to Italic. Apparently someone else fixed it by reinstalling 16.37. Not sure why but that's next on my list to try.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-22T03:03:04+00:00

    Thanks GeoMan. Unfortunately, my text copy requires bold too. :) Anyhow, like you, this dropped at the worst possible time as I have a deadline on August 31. So I just ended up reformatting all of my documents using EB Garamond instead of Adobe Garamond Pro. Definitely different, but I made it work. I hope Microsoft or Adobe fixes whatever is wrong soon.

    Tomas

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  3. 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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  4. 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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