Font Limit in Office 2004...?

[Scott Melendez]

We just migrated our most of our Type 1 fonts to the new OpenType standard,
by replacing our Adobe Type 1 fonts with their OpenType equivalents with
Adobe¹s Font Folio (at quite a cost). However, when I launched Word, I found
that not all of my OpenType faces were displayed (and this was behavior
exhibited across all Office applications). NONE of my other applications
have problems displaying my full font set.

To make matters stranger, when I tried to export a Word document from
Apple¹s Pages I would get an error: ³The font <font name> could not be
converted for use with Microsoft Office.²

Here is what I have tried:
Deleted the Office Font Cache
Cleaned my system font caches repeatedly
Tried the OpenType fonts on my Windows PC (and they work without a problem)

Finally deciding the mystery was worth paying Microsoft for, they tell me
that Office 2004 has a limit of 499 fonts (with fonts being classified as
individual typefaces, e.g., Helvetica, Helvetica Bold, and Helvetica Oblique
would be 3 fonts). However, they also told me this technote is not for
distribution.

Adobe claims to know nothing about this limit, and I haven¹t found any other
mention of it anywhere else. Can anyone verify this (or refute it)? And, by
chance, WHY does Office have this limit, particularly on OS X, where people
are likely to have a higher number of fonts?

 

[Scott Melendez]

I forgot my system configuration...

OS X 10.4.2 on a 1.67 GHz PowerBook, 2 Gb RAM, 100 Gb hard drive

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Scott:

I can find no trace of such an article in the Microsoft knowledgebase.
There is an article applicable to OS 9 that mentions an OS limit of 512
fonts or 16 MB, but there is no documented limit under OS X.

OS 10.4 on the other hand is creating a lot of problems with "corrupt or
duplicate" fonts.

Office builds its font cache from the system cache. It's important to
follow a special procedure to force the system to rebuild its font cache. I
assume that you have found and used that procedure.

To trouble-shoot this, first check that there are actually no duplicate
fonts, and then:

1) Divide your font collection into four sets of 100-ish each.

2) Load each set of fonts in turn. You must do a cold restart of your
system between each load to ensure you get a new system font cache each
time.

See if the missing fonts turn up doing it that way. I suspect they won't.
There are some fonts that Microsoft Office cannot handle: you may have some
of those. I do not have details of what those fonts are.

Hope this helps

I forgot my system configuration...

OS X 10.4.2 on a 1.67 GHz PowerBook, 2 Gb RAM, 100 Gb hard drive

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Scott Melendez]

John,

Thanks for the tip. I am actually going to duplicate my font setup on a
separate OS X partition. What I have done in the interim is install
FontAgent Pro, which has significantly speeded up my overall system, and
oddly enough, has enabled more (but not all) active fonts in Word.

Adobe says they know of no limitation with OpenType fonts, but I would not
be surprised at all if Office 2004 has some OpenType incompatibilities.
Which is odd, considering it was developed by Adobe and Microsoft jointly,
and they work fine on Windows.

This issue alone makes me want to desert Word ­ I would almost rather deal
with the learning curve involved with something like InDesign or the
simplicity of Pages.

--
Cheers

Scott