Typophile

Helvetica/Times font bug in Microsoft Word 2010?

sbd930 votes

I decided to port over a couple of fonts from my Mac over to my Windows PC (purely for personal use, not to distribute to others), which involved converting the .dfont and .ttc files to .ttf. However, there seems to be a bug concerning Helvetica and Times in Microsoft Word 2010. For the most part, they'll display correctly onscreen, but occasionally, they will randomly switch back to their Arial/Times New Roman counterparts. Sometimes it only does this for certain styles (i.e. Bold or Italic). Furthermore, even if the font displays correctly on the screen, when I go to the print menu, it will always change back to Arial/Times New Roman before I'm able to print. Not really a concern for Times, but REALLY annoying when I want to print something with Helvetica. What's weird is that the both fonts display correctly in other programs like PowerPoint and in web browsers, and other fonts like Cochin, Lucida Grande, Helvetica Neue, Palatino and Courier work perfectly. I thought it might have to do with Word "confusing" it with Arial or whatever, but before I decided to do this, I had a different version of Helvetica installed, and that worked perfectly too. I even tried making a brand new font file from scratch, and copied the glyphs over, but the problem still persists. Anyone know what's wrong and how to fix this? I prefer the Helvetica that ships with Mac OS because it has a much more extensive character set than the ones in Font Folio, etc.

This could be the result of font substitution entries in the registry. Open regedit and have a look under the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes

Thanks so much gargoyle! I deleted the Helvetica and Times entry in the registry, and I was a little worried at first, because the problem didn't go away right away, but after restarting my computer, it now works like a charm! Thanks again!

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