The case of the disappearing fonts




When I tried to open a document in Word 7 today I realised I only have four fonts available: Modern, Roman, Roman 10cpi and Script. A quick check in the fonts folder in Control Panel confirmed 104 fonts available on the system. Other Windows and Office applications (such as Excel) see all these fonts except for Word 7 and WordPad. I couldn't find anything in the options settings to give me a clue why Word can't see the fonts installed.
- Yuval Avrahami


In the early days of computers anything you printed used the fonts on the printer itself. With TrueType fonts like those used in Windows the font is on the computer and is downloaded to the printer. All laser, inkjet and most dot matrix printers can use TrueType fonts. However, some really old dot matrix printers cannot. Because Word and WordPad are word processors designed to produce printed documents the software's designers allow you to use only the fonts that the printer can use. With TrueType fonts this is not a problem. Excel, Access and Powerpoint are all designed not just to print but to display results on the screen. The designers here let you use any font regardless of the printer selected.
- Roy Chambers


Category: Word processing
Issue: Mar 1997
Pages: 163

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