Font Window Displays Strange Characters on the Right-Hand Side

[KH]

When I click on the font tab in Word 2007, I see on the left the different
types of fonts that are available but on the right which used to display
examples in English of how the fonts look, I see strange characters rather
than English words. The characters I see appear to be Hebrew or Arabic or
some other language. Is there someway to resolve this?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Do you mean in the font selection drop-down in the Font group on the
Home tab, or somewhere else?

As far as I know on an English-language system you should be seeing,
from left to right
1. An indicator telling you the type of font - e.g. TrueType/OpenType, a
2. The name of the font, written using the font, e.g. Aharoni
3. For fonts that Word uses for displaying non-Latin scripts, a sample
of the font in that script. For Aharoni, for example the text is in
Hebrew, is read from right to left and shows the first 7 letters of the
Hebrew alphabet. It's much the same for the Arabic ones, although
there's more than one way of listing the Arabic alphabet.

I don't know how Microsoft Word decides which fonts get this additional
display or which script to display.

Are you seeing something else? (AFAIK it used to be like this in Word
2003 but the non-Latin script display could not always be seen)

Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

 

[KH]

Thank you Peter. That clarifies it for me. I was expecting to see some
English words displayed for each of the different fonts since I had set the
language choice to US English.

 

[Corcomm]

One of my customers has a simular issue.
As soon as he highlights a word and turn it bold, the used fonts window
includes an arabic character behind it.
He swears that he did not install any new software does not speak or read
any arabic but we can;t get it turned off.
Even uninstalling office 2003 and installing it a gain does not clear this
issue.
Starting with a blank document and deleting the normal.dot file, the first
font chnages causes the arabic to return in the used font options.
Language is set to default English-US

Any suggestions