Topics in this chapter   Choosing an Operating System     Choosing a Web Browser     Administering Fonts     Printing Documents

Administering Fonts

Microsoft Office XP provides fonts that allow users to view and edit documents in different languages, across different scripts. Some of these fonts are installed with Office XP; others are available in the Microsoft Office XP Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI Pack). Some international fonts supplied with Office XP might update Microsoft Windows fonts that users already have.

Understanding how Office XP uses fonts for different languages can help you administer fonts for users across your international organization.

International fonts included with Office XP

The Office XP Multilingual User Interface Pack includes fonts necessary for working with the international features of Office. These additional fonts allow you to:

• Display the user interface and online Help in various languages.
  
  
• Display text in various languages — in an existing document or text that you enter — including languages that require Input Method Editors (IMEs).

Note   The Multilingual User Interface Pack also includes IMEs that work with Internet Explorer as well as Office XP applications.

In addition to the fonts in the Multilingual User Interface Pack, which support particular character sets, Office XP also includes a complete Unicode font, which supports all characters in all of the languages supported by Office. This Unicode font is especially useful when you cannot apply multiple fonts — for example, when you work with multilingual data in Microsoft Access data tables.

The following table lists the fonts provided by the Multilingual User Interface Pack, along with the code pages and the languages they support.

The following table lists the fonts provided by Office XP, along with the code pages and the languages that the fonts support.

Updating Windows fonts to big fonts

Many of the fonts that are included with Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, and Microsoft Windows 2000 are stored as big font files. The big font files include glyphs for multiple character sets and accommodate many languages. Big font files include Tahoma, which is the default Office XP user interface font for all languages except Asian languages. When you install Office XP, Office updates existing Windows fonts to big fonts and installs additional fonts.

The following is a list of big fonts that Office Setup installs or updates:

• Arial
  
  
• Arial Black
  
  
• Arial Bold
  
  
• Arial Narrow
  
  
• Bookman Old Style
  
  
• Courier New
  
  
• Garamond
  
  
• Impact
  
  
• Tahoma
  
  
• Times New Roman
  
  
• Trebuchet (Central and Eastern European languages only)
  
  
• Verdana®

Installing fonts that support multiple languages

If your users frequently share documents or e-mail messages across different scripts, you can install fonts that support those scripts.

In most cases, Office Setup automatically installs or updates fonts to display characters in multiple scripts. For example, a document formatted in the Arial font can display Western European, Cyrillic, Turkish, Baltic, Central European, Greek, Arabic, or Hebrew text.

For Asian languages or Unicode characters, however, you must install the appropriate fonts on users' computers.

Important   Do not change the default user interface font. The Office XP user interface is designed to fit Tahoma and certain Asian fonts. Using a different user interface font might truncate user interface labels in some languages.

Installing Asian fonts

Office XP provides Asian fonts for four languages: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. If users need to edit or read documents in these languages, they must install the appropriate Asian fonts.

To install Asian fonts

1. On the Set Feature Installation States page in the Custom Installation Wizard, select the Office Tools\International Support feature.
   
   
2. For each of the Asian fonts you want to use, select the font, and set the installation state to Run from My Computer.

Installing Indic fonts

The Indic languages supported in Office XP include Devanagari-based languages (Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit) and Tamil. If users need to edit or read documents in these languages, they must install the appropriate Indic fonts.

To install Indic fonts

1. On the Set Feature Installation States page in the Custom Installation Wizard, select the Office Tools\International Support feature.
   
   
2. For each of the Indic fonts you want to use, select the font, and set the installation state to Run from My Computer.

Installing the Unicode font

Some documents, such as Access data tables, can display only one font at a time. But these documents can display multilingual text in more than one script if you use the Unicode font. The Unicode font provided by Office XP allows users to input and display characters across scripts and across code pages that support the various scripts.

Installing a Unicode font on users' computers has some disadvantages. First, the Unicode font file is much larger than font files based on code pages. Second, some characters might look different from their character equivalents in code pages. For these reasons, do not use the Unicode font as your default font. However, if your users share documents across many different scripts, the Unicode font might be your best choice.

To install the Unicode font

1. On the Set Feature Installation States page in the Custom Installation Wizard, select the Office Tools\International Support feature.
   
   
2. Select the Universal Font feature, and set the installation state to Run from My Computer.

See also

You can install a utility that adds code-page information to the properties shown when you right-click a font file in Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows 2000. For more information about the font properties extension utility, see the Microsoft Typography Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/.