MS Office documents showing "invisible" fonts when opened in MS Office 2011 on Mac OSX 10.7.1 (Lion).

I am having what is referred to as the "invisible font" problem. When I open an MS Word or Excel document, the text appears to be non-existent. Powerpoint presentations are about 1/2 and 1/2. I have yet to be able to open a single MS Office document in the 3 months I've had this new laptop, except for ones I created new in Office 2011. Details are below.

The "invisible font" problem is described here:

"Upgrade from an older version of MS Office (at least V.x, 2004) and documents opened in MS Office 2011 may appear to be blank or empty." (See: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110810001909244).

The solutions to the problem are listed as follows via the link above, but none of these solutions have solved this problem on my laptop.

"Sometimes closing (not quitting the application) and re-opening the document allows you to see the content. The crux of the problem seems to be a problem with multiple copies of fonts.

Summary:

Use Font Book to resolve duplicate fonts.
Manually remove the older versions of duplicated font files from ~/Library/Fonts.
Restart the Mac."

I purchased a MacBook Pro from Apple early in July of this year. I purchased a new copy, licensed, of MS Office 2011 and installed it on my new MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro runs OSX 10.7.1 (Lion). Previously, my laptop was a 2007 MacBook. I am still able to open the documents on that laptop. It doesn't appear to be a data transfer/file corruption problem. It appears to be either an MS Office or Lion compatibility issue. I have even highlighted the entire document ("apple/butterfly key + A") to see if I can change the font color to "black", but the document isn't even reading / "seeing" that the font is there. The fonts used in the documents are standard ones that are available in office, such as Ariel, Tahoma, Times or Times New Roman, and Cambria. The documents range in size from 40 pages to 400 pages, but size doesn't seem to be the issue. The "invisible" font problem occurs on all MS Office documents, except ones that I create new in this version of MS Office 2011.

If it matters, I did not migrate my applications when I migrated my data from my old laptop to my new laptop. I installed MS Office 2011 fresh; I did not install it over a previous version of MS Office. The problem applies equally to documents that are *.doc or *.docx. My 2007 MacBook laptop runs MS Office 2008.

Has anyone else had this problem, and how did you solve it? This problem is preventing me from completely switching over to my new laptop, which I would like to do ASAP.

This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread.

Answer

sf_nc

What finally worked was to restore the Standard Fonts. I took several steps to get there, though, so in case they are all required I'll include them here.

I followed each of these suggestions:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10389716-263.html?tag=mncol;title

Run validations with Font Book

Launch Font Book and press command-A to select all fonts. Then from the "File" menu select "Validate Fonts" and wait for the results in the font validation window. Keep in mind that even though you may find minor problems with your current fonts, its best to follow the saying "if it's not broken then don't fix it", and leave well-enough alone unless you're experiencing problems.

Clear the font cache

In OS X, fonts are handled by the Apple Type Server process, which stores commonly used fonts in a cache for quick access. If there is corruption in this cache then you may experience a variety of troubles. To clear the cache, in pre-Leopard versions of OS X go to the /Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/ folder and remove the "com.apple.ATS" file. After doing this, restart the system.

For OS X 10.5 and later, you cannot easily access the user and global font caches, but you can use Apple's "atsutil" terminal command to manage the ATS process. Open "Terminal" and enter the following commands to clear the user (or global) databases and restart the server:

atsutil databases -removeUser
atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -ping

NOTE: Use "sudo atsutil databases -remove" instead of the first command to remove the database for all users.

Avoid older font formats

If you can, avoid ".dfont" and "Type 1 PostScript" fonts. This suggestion may depend on the requirements for various programs, but if you have an older font suite that you are thinking about installing, it may run into problems with newer programs so you might consider getting an updated version of the suite before installing. Granted you can always try, but there is the potential that older font formats can cause problems so we recommend you stick to the more modern ".ttf" and ".ttc" fonts.

Manually clear out duplicates

Font Book has an option to "Resolve Duplicates" (available in the "Edit" menu), but this is limited in functionality and may not remove the specific font duplicate which you desire to remove. As such, the best approach to managing duplicate fonts is to do it manually (tedious, but effective if done correctly). In Font Book, you can use the "Show Font info" option (command-I) to see information about a selected font, and especially where the font is located on your system. Doing this for your duplicate fonts will allow you to select which one to remove, either by removing it from its font folder, or by right-clicking it and selecting "Disable".

That still didn't appear to solve the problem. It improved it -- some fonts still rendered -- but others did not.

I then went into FontBook and restored the Standard Fonts:

Click "File" ==> "Restore Standard Fonts".

This displayed a note saying that all non-Standard Fonts would be placed in a folder called, "Disabled Fonts". The system places several fonts in there. I then moved that entire folder to trash. I restarted my Mac, and opened the problematic documents. All fonts are displaying just fine now. I am SO pleased.

Thank you very much for your help.

I am seeing the Mac Forums that there are font issues with Lion, most related to Safari, some related to MS Office. I did not have Safari font problems, on MS Office font problems.

MS Office documents showing "invisible" fonts when opened in MS Office 2011 on Mac OSX 10.7.1 (Lion).

Replies (8)

Question Info

MS Office documents showing "invisible" fonts when opened in MS Office 2011 on Mac OSX 10.7.1 (Lion).

Replies (8) 

Question Info

Replies (8)