Adobe fonts not loading into MS Word 365

Report · Sep 15, 2021

About 2 weeks ago, I ran into the following problem:

When I select an Adobe font (e.g., Adobe Garamond Pro, Garamond Premier Pro, Brioso Pro, Minion 3), even though the font name displays correctly in the ribbon's font list, the text of the document uses a substitute font (which appears to be Arial) and the document also prints as displayed, i.e., in Arial.

The problem seems to be limited to Word. The fonts work okay in Excel.

Non-Adobe fonts, such as Sabon Next LT and Times New Roman seem to work okay. It may be that Word is okay with TT-OTF fonts but not with CFF-OTF fonts, but I haven't been able to do enough testing to know that for sure. In any event, Word USED to work with the Adobe fonts until a couple of weeks ago.

I have reinstalled all my fonts. I have uninstalled and reinstalled MS Office 365, all to no avail. Microsoft support has been unhelpful. I'm hoping I can get some answers here.

In research, I found others had encountered similar problems with Word and Adobe fonts going back a decade. Some people solved the problem with the two fixes I tried, but I have been unable to find any solutions that work for me.

Report · Oct 21, 2021

What System are you on?

The fonts you mention work just fine in M365 on my system (Mac)

Report · Oct 21, 2021

I am on Windows. However, the problem has happened to people using Apple computers as well.

It is NOT a problem being experienced by most people using a particular system. It seems to be a problem that occurs occasionally to people using different versions of Office and various versions of their OS. It seems to be an anomoly in a file used by Word to select fonts, which is not used by other programs.

Report · Oct 21, 2021

[just checking my updates] As there was an update to M365 on Oct 12, I'm going to suspect Microsoft breaking something. Not much help, I know, but I too have seen many reports of issues for a couple of years with the Word (just Word) and CFF-OTF. (shrug)

Report · Oct 21, 2021

The problem goes back about 3 months and is not occurring on my other machine using the same version of Microsoft 365.

Report · Oct 21, 2021

Others have had the same problem going back at least a decade. It seems to be fairly infrequent, but not due to something new in Word.I am guessing Word uses a different routine than other programs (including other programs in MS Office) to pull font information since the problem occurs only in Word and in Outlook, which uses Word to compose messages).