I am having difficulty getting the name and sample string to appear on the font drop down menu within Microsoft Word. The position within the drop down list where the font name should appear is present, but there is no text displayed. It is only blank. The font itself can be selected and it works fine.
My guess is that I am not doing something correctly, but I cannot figure out what the problem is.
Any suggestions?
Jim
Hello Jim,
A possible solution is that you have made a font which is not complete with all the alphabetic characters. Word requires the characters of the name, to be present as glyphs in the font. For example if the font name is MyfontBI the glyphs ‘M’ ‘y’ ‘f’ ‘o’ ‘n’ ‘t’ ‘B’ and ‘I’ all have to be represented in your font.
Joe.
I came to ask the same question - and found the answer here. I don’t know how many people may be creating ‘short’ font sets and thus hitting this snag, but it might be a good FAQ entry.
I was creating ultra-simple font set containing definitions for numeric characters 1 thru 5 only as tally marks and so didn’t even begin to get into the alpha characters.
Regards,
2kmaro
[edit] Oops, spoke too soon. Font’s name is “Tally Marks” and I went back in and defined characters for both lower and uppercase characters that are used in the font’s name and it still doesn’t show up in either the list of fonts available or in the list of recently used fonts in Word 2003. It does show up in the Font Name area when you have selected a character defined in that font.
What am I missing? 
I even deleted the previous copy of the font, deleted Normal.dot and then installed the revised font file. Rebooted the machine between deleting the earlier copy of the font file and installing the new one.
For symbol fonts Word displays these characters:
AbCdEfGhIj
That is good to know information also, but in this case I created it as a regular character set file. Now, I think at some point early on I may have chosen the symbol option and perhaps I messed something up that way.
I’ll try starting from scratch again - drawing 15 straight lines and copying a few characters from another font set isn’t a great loss of work 
and I can give it a completely different name and identity and see how things go.
has anyone got a solution yet?
I was working on Auslan fonts (hand shapes representing each letter)
and the first one that I made (no. 2 in red above came up fine)
but the second one (no. 1) came up blank.
I was wondering why the name is blank since there’s no problem with the other ones that I made?
Infos would be much appreciated, thanks. All fonts are working when typing out in Word, it’s just that the no.1 name is blank in the font list drop down.
The solution is to either make sure your font contains outlines for these characters: AbCdEfGhIj. Or disable showing fonts in their own font, as described here:
I suggest you try the first solution.
Hi Erwin,
thank you for your reply.
Both my Auslan fonts have uppercase and lowercase, is this what you meant by AbCdEfGhIj ?
The strange thing is that I emailed the font to another computer and it appeared in the drop-down menu fine. It’s just my computer… any ideas why that may be?
thanks for the tip about the disabling font in Word.
Try any or all of these:
Toos, Autonaming
Format, Settings, metrics recalculate.
Format, Settings, Ranges, Version 3, Unicode ranges and code pages recalculate.
Uninstall the font and reinstall it. Reboot.