Added fonts aren't showing in the font menu

After you've added some fonts, they should be showing in the font menu in each application, alongside all of your installed fonts. However, there are a few cases where you may not see the font right away.

Restart the software program

Some programs, including Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office, do not automatically update the font menu when a new font is added. These applications need to be restarted before the new fonts are available for use.

The font family is listed under another name

Different software programs can display font names differently in their font menus. FF Market, for example, will appear as “Market OT” in InDesign and “MarketOT” in Microsoft Word.

If the font family includes the foundry in the name, e.g. FF Market Web or JAF Facit, it will sometimes not be included in the font name in the application.

The font weights and styles are listed differently

Many programs, including Adobe Creative Cloud, use a “Typographic” naming convention. The software bundles all variations of a font under the Font Family name. For example, InDesign will display “Proxima Nova” as the Font Family name, then add all the variations for that font in a drop-down list.

List of Proxima Nova styles

Condensed or Compressed families will usually group under their own family (for example, “Proxima Nova Condensed”), but there are some exceptions. Myriad Pro, for example, treats Condensed as a font variation instead of a separate family.

List of Myriad Pro styles

Many Microsoft programs use the “4-Face Family” naming convention for a font. The menu is designed assuming a font has four variations associated with it: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic.

Regular will appear in the font menu, while Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic are selected with the Italic and Bold style buttons in the Type Control Bar.

Bold and italic buttons in a word processing program

For a font with many variations (like Proxima Nova), only a handful of the variations will be listed in the menu - the rest are accessible by the Italic and Bold buttons:

Proxima Nova variations in the menu

 Adobe

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