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Microsoft Office for Mac has stopped displaying Unicode Devanagari font conjunct characters (consonant clusters) correctly

Anonymous
2023-09-16T15:14:56+00:00

I am on a 2020 Macbook Air running Big Sur 11.7.1, and Microsoft Office for Mac 16.77. In the last year or so, many (but not all) unicode Devanagari fonts has stopped functioning properly in Office (e.g. Word, Outlook). Conjunct glyphs are decomposed with virama ("vowel-killer") under each part of the consonant cluster. This is happening with many commonly used Devanagari fonts including Arial Unicode, Devanagari MT, Sanskrit 2020, Mangal, and others (though a few still seem to work).

Even if I copy Devanagari text that is properly displayed in a non-Microsoft program such as TextEdit or LibreOffice, when I paste it into Word or Outlook, it is displayed incorrectly.

This is a major step backward in functionality of Microsoft products with Unicode. What is the problem. Can it be fixed?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For education | MacOS

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  1. John Korchok 218.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2023-09-16T14:17:35+00:00

    T Lubin: Your problem is different than the original post. Please start a new thread, including your operating system and version of Word.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-09-16T15:26:29+00:00

    Actually the problem T. Lubin describes is exactly the problem I described my original post. I am using Word 2019 (16.76.1) with Mac OS 12.6.8 (Monterey).

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-09-16T15:40:07+00:00

    Yes, and I am on Mac OS 11.7.1 using Word for Mac 16.77. The problem affects Outlook too. I have posted this question separately at

    https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-office-for-mac-has-stopped-displaying/ebd3fba8-edac-42e0-954b-cfcdc58679f8

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-09-16T15:45:00+00:00

    Split from this thread.

    I have the same problem but with multiple Devanagari fonts, both in Word and in Outlook. They used to work fine, but now conjunct glyphs are all decomposed with the use of virama. This is a major step backward for Microsoft. (BTW, everything still works fine in LibreOffice!)

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  5. Bob Jones AKA CyberTaz MVP 425.7K Reputation points
    2023-09-16T18:06:19+00:00

    This is a major step backward in functionality of Microsoft products with Unicode. What is the problem. Can it be fixed?

    Not a major step backward but perhaps a step forward.

    Do these happen to be PostScript Type 1 fonts? If so, PostScript Type 1 was deprecated by Adobe earlier this year & is no longer supported by Microsoft. Per the Release Notes for the 16.76 Update:

    Deprecation of PostScript Type 1 fonts: Support for PostScript Type 1 fonts is ending on the Microsoft 365 apps for macOS.

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