I guess this is related to the recent Windows Update which broke the OTF support.

See this link, also this typophile thread.

Thanks, ayangyi

The problem is, however, only with bullets, not with the entire OTF-fonts, and did also exist prior to the windows-update.

Oops, that sounds too weird...

Please provide step-by-step description of how to reproduce the bug. What method are you using to input the bullet character?

Hi John

To input the bullet glyph from a certain font to a list in Word 2010, I:

1) Choose the bulleted list icon, then choose Define New Bullet.

2) Click the Symbol button and set the font to the font I wish the bullet to be taken from.

3) Choose the bullet glyph (U+2022) from the glyph overview and press OK.

Best
Elias

Really? No one knows?

Have you tried selecting a glyph from an OTF font other than the bullet character itself in the Define New Bullet selection? I'm suspecting it will also not work, but it would be one of the variables I would try to isolate. The whole bulleted list mechanism in Word is a bit unusual in that the bullets are part of the formatting rather than part of the text, so it is entirely possible that the Word programmers included or inherited an assumption that the 'symbol' option source in this mechanism is a TrueType font.

Try ALT+o149 on the alphanumeric keypad…

That's not the issue, Nick. Elias isn't trying to insert a bullet character in the text: he's trying to get Word's custom symbol for bulleted lists function to accept an entity from a PostScript font. He's already confirmed that he can do this with a TrueType font, so the input mechanism for the bullet isn't the problem.

Thanks for clarifying, John. I suppose this is another example of how the CFF format is seriously flawed, no?

I think it is more likely an example of how software developers have inherited code written by people who ignored PS Type 1 fonts in the past, and hence made assumptions about TrueType fonts as sources. In a case like this, I would guess that the symbol insert is somehow grabbing a TT glyph direct from the font's glyf table, rather than inserting a character code and mapping via the cmap table. So when it encounters a CFF font it can't find the glyf table and is unable to insert the symbol.

Thanks for your inputs, John.
The problem seems, however, only to be with the bullet glyph (U+2022). If I customize the bullet list with other glyphs from an OTF-font, they show just fine. This is also why the best solution I've been able to come up with so far is to add another bullet with a different unicode-value.

Deeply weird.

Weird indeed.