How do I group font families in the font menu?

[Amar]

This is really a loooooooong standing issue, but so far I haven't found the
solution.

How do I get my fonts to be displayed in Word grouped in families, like in
(almost) any other app?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

It's just not a feature that Word offers. The only "fix" is to use a
third-party app and use their menu.

Your request for the feature should be noted here.

 

[Priyanka Singhal [MSFT]]

Hi Amar ,
Thanks for the post , I Will forward this suggestion to our design
engineers.
Thanks,
Priyanka

 

[h.reininger]

Thanks for that! Just a question, are you saying no one has requested
this "feature" so far? Every other app is doing this as long as I can
think back. How do members of the MBU choose a font in Word from a
(potentially) long list of cryptic and often nondescriptive names?

I am a designer, I definitely won't touch Fontbook and am using
FontAgent pro to manage my fonts, works very well in almost all apps.
If I could attach a screenshot here, I would show you MY choices in the
Word font menu - definitely not easy to handle.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Priyanka Singhal [MSFT]]

Hi ,
Yes , This feature has been requested before , but each post helps.
Your input is very valuable as it helps in making decisions. I have
forwarded your request for the feature.
Thanks,
Priyanka

 

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

"Lots" of people have requested the feature. What Priyanka is saying is
that so far "not enough" have requested it to move it from the "Maybe Next
Time" bucket into the "Definitely This Time" bucket

Each change costs time and money. Each change pleases some users and
displeases others. It's a constant balancing act...

Now to answer your question:

1) A skilled user of Word would rarely if ever use the "Font" menu. They
would reveal the Formatting toolbar, and use Tools>Customise to drag the
Font Name box wider so they could read the font name properly. Then they
would click the Font box and type the first letter of the font name. That
jumps the list to position with say the "W"s at the cursor, so "Wingdings"
is the third one down...

2) At the top of the toolbar menu, your five most recent fonts are grouped.

3) Word Processor users typically do not care about font "families". If
they know anything at all about fonts, it is that their Style Guide requires
them to use specified fonts for specified things, so they will go for the
font by its name, not its "family".

4) Professional users of Word will almost never do anything at all with
fonts. They perform ALL of their formatting with Styles. They define their
desired font, size, weight, kerning and tracking into the style. Do the
whole job the first time, and they never have to think about it again.

5) I run with all of Word's default toolbars hidden. I use special
toolbars of my own making that contain a button for each of the 20-odd
styles I use frequently.

6) Those styles are each defined differently depending upon the Type of
document I am working on. Those definitions are held in a series of
Templates: One for "Manuals", one for "Reports", one for "Websites", one
for "Letters and Memos".

7) Each "kind" of document has the correct template attached.

I never even think about fonts until I change jobs...

So: that's how I do it

You are a "designer"? So you tell ME what fonts to use for what. Give that
to me as a list, I will define your requirements into my templates, and you
will never get the font wrong again

You and I both need to remember that Word uncomfortably straddles a wide
range of different target markets. But at its basis, it is a Word
Processor. It is designed to handle large amounts of text, quickly and
automatically. It is designed with extremely powerful automation features
to enable users to bulk-process text. Sort of like "Television" as opposed
to "Oil on Canvas". Both do "pictures"; TV, like Word, does it in bulk

I have to get over the fact that Word is impossibly cluttered with newbie
features designed to allow people who don't know how to use it to get
"something like" what they want quickly. I mutter in frustration at how my
efforts to achieve a precisely-specified result with absolute precision
across a 2,500-page document are rent asunder by Word's attempts to "help"
by creating a numbered list with non-compliant formatting in its efforts to
assist a user who doesn't understand paragraph numbering. Word is the
world's MOST powerful and MOST adaptable word processor. But regrettably,
its entire design philosophy is aimed at people who can't even handle
AppleWorks or TextEdit. Grrrr....

You might just have to get over the fact that the Fonts Menu is a pig
It doesn't even exist in PC Word, and I think you have discovered the reason
for that

When you get a few spare minutes, take a dig around in the Word Help.
Hopefully, you will find a few power features hiding in there that will be
useful for what YOU do. It will never challenge Quark or InDesign (by
design...) but it will get close enough for undemanding jobs, and it will do
huge jobs faaaast...

Cheers

Thanks for that! Just a question, are you saying no one has requested
this "feature" so far? Every other app is doing this as long as I can
think back. How do members of the MBU choose a font in Word from a
(potentially) long list of cryptic and often nondescriptive names?

I am a designer, I definitely won't touch Fontbook and am using
FontAgent pro to manage my fonts, works very well in almost all apps.
If I could attach a screenshot here, I would show you MY choices in the
Word font menu - definitely not easy to handle.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--

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

 

[h.reininger]

WOW!!! Hey, that's what I call an exhaustive answer, no frills, right
down to the meat. Super! I will need a few "moments" to digest all your
suggestions you have given me. Thanks for that!

Yes, I am a designer, and I live my days in InDesign, Illustrator and
Photoshop. Occasionally someone comes along and wants me to do a
template in Word because it's easier for him, so I get going - that's
when I notice that choosing a font in Word is quite cumbersome when you
have about 150 font families active, in all about 500 fonts.

I sent a screenshot of my entire Word font menu today to Priyanka, that
is a file based on a menu width of 6 cm of 2.5 meters (!) length!
Imagine that! The same amount of fonts fits in InDesign comfortably on
my screen, without scrolling.

That's all I want. Is that too much to ask?

 

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

No, it's certainly not too much to ask, they could do it relatively easily,
I am sure.

The real problem is that only a tiny fraction of Word's word-processing
users would WANT it that way

Font "families" are meaningless to me, and to the majority of Word users. I
know exactly which font I am *required* to use, and I go for it by name.
After thirty years of doing this, I still wouldn't have a clue which
families the fonts I use are in, let alone what is in the others I have
only about 120 fonts in total on the computer, and I *use* only about seven
of them.

Let's see now:

Arial for Headings and Captions...
Times New Roman for serif body...
Verdana in place of Arial if we're going out to the web...
One special-purpose font for the corporate logo...
Symbol and Wingdings for special characters...
Arial Unicode MS if all else fails....

I know: I am a tragic disappointment to you

Now, if the Designer requires different fonts for a particular document
(very rare in corporate documentation...) he or she will give me the list.
But it will still contain only perhaps seven items.

Chances are, if there's a Designer involved, there's also a production house
involved. If so, they will flip the real fonts into the document when they
get it, simply by updating the fonts in the master styles.

In large-scale documentation, you set up a series of "master" styles: Normal
is one, Heading Base, Caption Base, Table Base. These contain the basic
settings for each of the other styles in the document, including the Font.
That way, if the Designer decides he doesn't like Arial (and most of them
don't...) he simply changes a single entry in the style Heading Base, and
all of the headings in the entire document swings instantly from Arial to
Helvetica headings.

If I were preparing a Word template for a customer (and I frequently do...)
one of the things I would ensure is that there is NO formatting anywhere
that is NOT applied by a style. That way I can instantly re-impose
consistency when I get the broken mess back after the customer's
subject-matter experts have been hacking and chopping at it.

Two very powerful commands in Word that I live by: Control + Spacebar, and
Command + Option + Q. Applied to selected text, the first instantly removes
any non-style character formatting, the second instantly removes any
non-style paragraph formatting. I am a testy old codger: I typically hit a
scrambled mess with those before even looking at it. Once I get the
formatting zeroed back to the formatting of the styles, I can then instantly
see where the wrong styles have been applied.

I sometimes also apply another "Long-Document" trick... I format all of the
styles in the document with a bright pink font, except the styles that are
supposed to be there. Then I quickly scan the document: any pink text has
the wrong formatting

I deal in documents that are typically over a thousand pages. I've been
around computers and Word long enough to know that things run much faster
and with fewer problems if you minimise the number of fonts loaded. If I am
working on a 2,000-page document, chances are it's all I *will* be doing for
six to 12 months. So I will remove most of the unused fonts from the
machine: cut it back to 50 or so fonts and it frees up memory and makes the
machine run faster -- every little bit of speed helps with big documents

Cheers

WOW!!! Hey, that's what I call an exhaustive answer, no frills, right
down to the meat. Super! I will need a few "moments" to digest all your
suggestions you have given me. Thanks for that!

Yes, I am a designer, and I live my days in InDesign, Illustrator and
Photoshop. Occasionally someone comes along and wants me to do a
template in Word because it's easier for him, so I get going - that's
when I notice that choosing a font in Word is quite cumbersome when you
have about 150 font families active, in all about 500 fonts.

I sent a screenshot of my entire Word font menu today to Priyanka, that
is a file based on a menu width of 6 cm of 2.5 meters (!) length!
Imagine that! The same amount of fonts fits in InDesign comfortably on
my screen, without scrolling.

That's all I want. Is that too much to ask?

--

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

 

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

At our visit to Redmond last week, I asked Microsoft if they would enable
listing fonts by Families in the font menu.

They said they would investigate the issue to see whether it would fit
within the budget for a future version of Office. One consideration is "How
well do we want it to work?" There are two scenarios:

1) They could group the fonts by the "Families" encoded into the fonts by
the font foundries. That's relatively simple.

2) They could group the fonts by their "proper" font families. That is a
lot harder.

The problem is that the font foundries each have their own standards for
encoding families. If Microsoft simply reports what the font foundry says,
that will work well if all of your fonts come from the same foundry. To get
it "right", Microsoft needs to make up a correlation table between every
name from every foundry for every family. That's a lot of work. Even if
Microsoft could achieve the impossible and get all of the world's font
foundries to agree on a common set of family names ...

One thing they will need to know is how many people "want" the feature.
Just to give you an idea, one of the new features we will be getting "as a
result of user requests" had more than 300,000 requests. So far, I know of
*3* requests for Font Families in Mac Word

Cheers

No, it's certainly not too much to ask, they could do it relatively easily,
I am sure.

The real problem is that only a tiny fraction of Word's word-processing
users would WANT it that way

Font "families" are meaningless to me, and to the majority of Word users. I
know exactly which font I am *required* to use, and I go for it by name.
After thirty years of doing this, I still wouldn't have a clue which
families the fonts I use are in, let alone what is in the others I have
only about 120 fonts in total on the computer, and I *use* only about seven
of them.

Let's see now:

Arial for Headings and Captions...
Times New Roman for serif body...
Verdana in place of Arial if we're going out to the web...
One special-purpose font for the corporate logo...
Symbol and Wingdings for special characters...
Arial Unicode MS if all else fails....

I know: I am a tragic disappointment to you

Now, if the Designer requires different fonts for a particular document
(very rare in corporate documentation...) he or she will give me the list.
But it will still contain only perhaps seven items.

Chances are, if there's a Designer involved, there's also a production house
involved. If so, they will flip the real fonts into the document when they
get it, simply by updating the fonts in the master styles.

In large-scale documentation, you set up a series of "master" styles: Normal
is one, Heading Base, Caption Base, Table Base. These contain the basic
settings for each of the other styles in the document, including the Font.
That way, if the Designer decides he doesn't like Arial (and most of them
don't...) he simply changes a single entry in the style Heading Base, and
all of the headings in the entire document swings instantly from Arial to
Helvetica headings.

If I were preparing a Word template for a customer (and I frequently do...)
one of the things I would ensure is that there is NO formatting anywhere
that is NOT applied by a style. That way I can instantly re-impose
consistency when I get the broken mess back after the customer's
subject-matter experts have been hacking and chopping at it.

Two very powerful commands in Word that I live by: Control + Spacebar, and
Command + Option + Q. Applied to selected text, the first instantly removes
any non-style character formatting, the second instantly removes any
non-style paragraph formatting. I am a testy old codger: I typically hit a
scrambled mess with those before even looking at it. Once I get the
formatting zeroed back to the formatting of the styles, I can then instantly
see where the wrong styles have been applied.

I sometimes also apply another "Long-Document" trick... I format all of the
styles in the document with a bright pink font, except the styles that are
supposed to be there. Then I quickly scan the document: any pink text has
the wrong formatting

I deal in documents that are typically over a thousand pages. I've been
around computers and Word long enough to know that things run much faster
and with fewer problems if you minimise the number of fonts loaded. If I am
working on a 2,000-page document, chances are it's all I *will* be doing for
six to 12 months. So I will remove most of the unused fonts from the
machine: cut it back to 50 or so fonts and it frees up memory and makes the
machine run faster -- every little bit of speed helps with big documents

Cheers

--

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