Bahnschrift font - major issues

Thanks Sampo,

For the life of me , I have no idea why MS people repeatedly deny there is an issue here (and try to blame paying customers). Fact of the matter is MS released Bahnschrift with some fanfare, and it did not put in place all the necessary underpinnings to allow it to work properly. This seems to be a common theme with MS new offerings. Teams and One Note come to mind.

Have spoken to adobe people and they all recognise there is a problem..and they recommend not using Bahnschrift until the issues are sorted. Bit too late for me because I adopted it as my main text font, before getting those warnings and now have to put in place cumbersome work arounds to produce any document. MS, of course, does not offer any warnings/guidance to its customers (and instead wants to blame them)

I can confirm what the original poster (and others in other forums) reported: printing from Word directly to a physical printer renders the font faces correctly, but the Export to PDF option and printing to 3rd party virtual PDF printers will only yield the single Bahnschrift face.

A couple other observations on this Bahnschrift phenomenon:

1. it also doesn't save/export to PDF using Word online either. (Same PDF results as the Export to PDF on the desktop app.) That alone should be enough to discredit the "it must be your own computer/printer settings" argument.
2. While using MS Print to PDF does work, it is limited to preset page sizes. If you have custom page dimensions, this option won't help at all.

So pray tell me why do MS execs repeatedly say there is no problem (I have seen it regularly on this very issue), when there clearly is?

Have you got any idea saying nonsense like this wastes people's time, trying to solve a problem that is of MS's own making? I know how much time I have personally wasted on this, thinking to myself "what am I doing wrong? Maybe if I try this or try that..." Reality is it wasn't a problem I created. It is another case of MS dishing on to the market place a sub-standard half-baked product that doesn't work properly...

"I created PDF via Acrobat's PDFMaker yielding a file that does not preserve weight levels for Bahsnschrift .This yields exactly the same results as you described. Thus you and I are getting consistent results.

 I then created PDF via Word's built-in “save as PDF” yielding pretty much the same results as created by Acrobat's PDFMaker!

 My next attempt was to create PDF by printing to the Acrobat's Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance yielding pretty much the same results as created by Acrobat's PDFMaker!

Finally I tried creating PDF by printing to the (awful) Microsoft Print to PDFprinter driver instance yielding an output that resembles what you see in Word itself.

 OK. What's going on.

 Acrobat PDFMaker and Microsoft Save as PDF(built into Word) use exactly the same underpinnings to pass content onto the respective PDF creation process and as such, I am not surprised by the fact that the results are similarly wrong with bothof these PDF creation methods. Apparently, Microsoft's Office Development group has not yet “hooked up” this output mechanism to know anything about OpenType Variablefonts. And thus, we get these very wrong results.

The Acrobat Adobe PDFprinting method to create PDF relies on Word creating GDI which the standard Microsoft-provided Windows PostScript driver converts to PostScript and Acrobat Distiller converts to PDF. Clearly, Microsoft has not updated the driver to know anything about OpenType Variablefonts. If you print to any real PostScript printer that uses the standard Windows Type 3 printer driver PSCRIPT5.DLL, you will get the same wrong results. There is nothing that Adobe by itself can do to fix this.

 The Microsoft Print to PDFmethod relies on Word creating GDI which converted internally to XPS which the Microsoft Print to PDFtype 4 printer driver converts to PDF. Apparently, Microsoft has put at least some cognizance of OpenType Variable TrueTypetechnology into that driver (with some issues of course such as lack of hyperlinks)." :- Adobe

Given that using a Brother Laser Printer to create a hard copy print from a document that used the various fonts that you mentioned does accurately display those fonts, I would suggest that the issue may be with the printer that you are using, or its driver.

Also, when using the Microsoft Print to PDF utility, hyperlinks in a document are retained and can be used in the pdf that is created.

Here, I am using Word in a 64-bit installation of Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, Version 2001 (Build 12430.20288 Click-to-Run) running under Windows 10 Pro, Version 10.0.18363 Build 18363