Font Substitution Problem

Question

Hello, all, and thank you in advance for your help.

My team uses many, many document templates to ensure consistency when creating customer-facing docs. These templates adhere to our company's style guidelines which include the fact that cover titles and headings appear in Arial bold. (The font Arial with the bold effect button pressed.) This has been working great for years.

Several weeks ago, however, most people started experiencing a font substitution. Instead of titles and headings appearing in bolded Arial, they started appearing as plain Arial. Interestingly, the font selection drop-down menu in the ribbon lists the font for these items as "Arial Bold"...which, of course, doesn't exist as a separate font...and the bold effect button is off. If one either selects the text in question and presses the bold effect button, the text appears correctly bolded (although "Arial Bold" still appears as the font selection). If I edit the style to apply the bold effect, this will correctly update all the text that uses the style.

Further investigation showed that if one goes to the Word > Options > Advanced > Font Substitution button/dialog, it quite clearly shows that "Arial Bold" is listed as missing, and that "Arial" is listed as the substituting font. If one changes the substituting font to "Default", make the change permanent, and save the doc, then the title and headers appear as they should (even though the font selection display continues to read "Arial Bold"). The problem with this is that it applies only at the individual document level for each individual user...and we have hundreds of historical documents that would need to be fixed and more than a dozen users.

So, all the solutions described above only apply on a per document basis. The prospect of fixing hundreds of documents one at a time is not appetizing. Does anyone have a global remedy to this situation?

(It should be noted I have a version of Word downloaded from my Office 365 account. I found someone in my company who had installed the DVD version of Word....and he didn't have this problem! Looking at his Font Substitution dialog, it defaults to the "Default" substitution setting, unlike what happens on my computer.)

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Since Arial is a core Windows font, this is more likely to be a Windows problem than an Office one. What version of Windows is installed on the computers that have this problem?

Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 all include a series of individual fonts within the Arial family, in which Arial Bold is a member. Here's a screen shot of the family (in the folder C:\Windows\Fonts) and the Properties dialog for Arial Bold in a copy of Windows 7 that has never had any installation of Office:

If these fonts don't appear in your copies of Windows, they may be damaged or you may be missing some updates.