It's 2018 and Microsoft still can't get fonts right.

Question

I can't get certain fonts to display correctly in Microsoft Word 2016. Most of the fonts in question are Noto fonts, which are made by Google. I can't the condensed fonts to be rendered as, well, condensed. The fonts Noto Sans Medium, Noto Serif Medium, etc. get rendered in a font similar in appearance to Arial. Before you ask, I am running Windows 8.1. I found this problem shortly after upgrading from plain Office 365 to Office 365 Home. I have searched around the Internet and MANY people are having similar issues on both Windows and Mac. I must stress that these fonts work with LibreOffice and other applications, and in plain Office 365. Any feedback would be nice.

Also, is there any way for me to update Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or any other Office application?

Answer 1

Noto 2.0 fonts are marred by incompatibility with certain applications due to the fonts themselves. See the following issue that was opened on the project's Github: https://github.com/googlei18n/fontmake/issues/304

Microsoft was not at fault. Noto's font builder wasn't automatically specifying a value (ulCodePageRange) required by convention, and the fonts were built without anyone manually doing so. This has been fixed in the latest build uploaded a few days before your question, 2.001. Unfortunately, Google's main website for downloading the fonts still serves the previous build so you will need to download them from Github. I can confirm that they now work with applications that were incompatible.