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Finding fonts in a Word document (Office Home & Student 2019)

Anonymous
2023-06-27T07:05:57+00:00

Hi : I've created a pretty long document -- it's a numbered catalogue of books -- using 10-point Bembo Standard as the default font for everything. However, when I "select all" the font box on the ribbon goes blank, as does the point size box. This suggests to me that at some places in the 110 pages of the document, some 'alien' fonts crept in somehow. Selecting the whole document and then entering Bembo Standard in the font box

should in theory globally change everything to Bembo. It doesn't. So. . . is there some method by which I can find these fugitive fonts and change them to Bembo? It would be nice if I could "select all fonts in document that aren't Bembo" but I guess that's not something anyone's thought a necessary option. All help would be appreciated.

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  1. Suzanne S Barnhill 277.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2023-06-27T21:45:57+00:00

    One thing I have learned is that things that are harder to find can be hidden in unused headers/footers. For example, if your document uses only the primary Header and Footer but at one time had Different First Page or Different Odd and Even enabled, the mystery text can be in the unused Front Page Header/Footer or Even Page Header/Footer.

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-06-27T21:56:28+00:00

    However, since I have no idea what these other fonts might be, it would not be possible to find them using the search feature. To do so I'd need to search for each font individually which is impractical … . Maybe future revisions of Word could include a "find fonts other than xxxx" or similar option?

    That's what my suggested method does (i.e. "find anything other than") albeit in a couple of steps. You can use a "not" operator with wildcards, but I haven't tested to see if it works for a format (I doubt if it would).

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-06-27T15:27:36+00:00

    Save your document, then use Find and Replace to replace any Font=Bembo with nothing. This will leave you with only content that is not set using the Bembo font (in any size or with any face attributes like italic, bold, etc.). You can then examine what is left to determine what other fonts are being used. Close without saving, then re-open the original to find & correct those instances as needed.

    This approach is also handy for finding otherwise invisible attributes like Language that can creep in from copying from other documents.

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  2. Jay Freedman 207.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2023-06-27T11:44:54+00:00

    The blank boxes for the font name and size when you select an entire large document is not necessarily a sign of "foreign" fonts. Usually, it just means that the size of the document has exceeded the limits of the code Word uses to look at the fonts, and it's given up.

    If you're still worried about it, try selecting smaller chunks of the text at a time. If the document contains section breaks, then start by selecting just one or two sections to see what happens in the font boxes. If the boxes are still blank, select one half of that section, then the other half. Repeat on smaller and smaller chunks until you find one that fills the boxes, then move on to the next piece. (This method is known in computer science as a binary search, and it's very efficient.)

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  3. Nikolino 2,120 Reputation points
    2023-06-27T08:07:52+00:00

    Here is a summary of the steps:

    Open your Word document.

    Press the Ctrl + H keys on your keyboard to open the Find and Replace dialog box.

    Leave the "Search for" field blank.

    Click the More >> button to expand the options.

    Click the "Format" button at the bottom of the dialog box and choose "Font" from the drop-down menu.

    In the Font dialog box, enter the name of the font you want to find (e.g. the foreign font) and click OK.

    Now the font name should appear in the "Find what" box.

    In the "Replace with" field, enter the name of the font you want to replace it with (e.g. Bembo Standard).

    Click the Replace All button to replace all occurrences of the foreign font with the font you want.

    These steps should help you find the foreign fonts in your Word document and replace them with the font you want. The steps were processed using AI.

    Hope this will help you.

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