Font Selection in Word

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1

Having trouble with font selection in MS Word (Office 365 on Win10x64) (Drivin me Crazeeeee)

I’ve created and installed a font that has the WGL4 subset (Pan-Euro 657 characters) plus a substantial number of Traditional Chinese (TC) characters. Call it MyTC. In MS Word I have a style that explicitly selects MyTC and I can type the Euro characters without issue. When I enter a code point from the TC range, Word refuses to continue using MyTC and switches back to one of it’s system fonts. The font it uses depends on whether on the [Language] selection I have made in the Word style, but no matter what Language selection I use in the Style, it never lets me use MyTC.

Does anyone have a clue as to the causes? My ulUnicode bits are set correctly (I believe). My font (looking at it in FontCreator) does indeed have those code points mapped. What else might this be??

2

Make sure that you calculate the Unicode Ranges in Font Properties. Word probably thinks the Chinese character set is not supported in your font, so it switches to another font that does.

3

This post about code page character ranges did solve it for another user:

Word Changes a CJK character to Another

4

Spot on! That does seem to be exactly my issue.

(I should have been able to locate that 2014 post in the forum, but I was not searching for the right terms.)

So my ulUnicodeRange bits were set correctly. My characters are in the 4E00-9FFF range which is one of the ranges in the massive range represented by bit 59). I do have bit 59 set, but I had not considered the Code Page bits. Hmmm …

Not sure whether, for Traditional Chinese, it is controlled by bit 17 / code page 93 / JIS/Japan … or by bit 20 / code page 950 / Chinese: Traditional chars —Taiwan and Hong Kong. I’ll try each independently and report back on results.

By the way, could you tell me how FC decides on which bits to set? Is it some “50% of the characters in the range” kind of rule??

5

After some testing in Microsoft Word, I can confirm that selecting …

Chinese: Traditional chars —Taiwan and Hong Kong (950)

in Font => Properties => Ranges => Code Page Character Ranges => Edit

… allowed my font to be selected by Word for bona fide Chinese characters. I tried the same test for the selectionbox for JIS/Japan (932), but results were muddied by other factors, and I couldn’t do a definitive test.

Thanks for the support!