Not showing up in MS Word / MS Office for Mac

[arrowtype]

I’ve just found that I can’t see Shantell Sans in the font menu of MS Word for Mac. It does work in Windows 11 Word, and every other app I’ve tried it in.

I’ve installed the latest Shantell Sans version (1.008), then nuked my OS font cache and restarted. Word for Mac is (almost) the latest version – v 16.68, from December 2022.

This is true for both static and variable fonts.

MS Word is notoriously obnoxious for font designers. But, surely there is a way to get this working. Things to try:

• Check the fonts again with FontBakery. Google Fonts checks have already cleared, but maybe I can try different check profiles, etc.
• Try checking with CompareFamily, from Adobe
• (extreme option) reach out to type folks at Microsoft for debugging ideas

[arrowtype]

Turns out, I had to “prioritize” this font. I found the solution in this troubleshooting guide: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/issues-with-fonts-in-office-for-macos-66a299b2-47ec-43bd-a196-a56b94d2ae88?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

Instructions as quoted from Microsoft’s guide (Click to expand)

To set prioritized fonts

1. Find the postscript names of the fonts that you want to prioritize. Note: Postscript names are not the same as font families and each style will have a different postscript name, so to prioritize an entire font family you may need to add multiple names.
2. Launch Font Book (open applications folder in Finder, find and launch "Font book.app")
3. Select the font you want to prioritize in the center pane
4. Ensure Font Information is selected in the top left of the window, and find the PostScript Name field in the right pane and copy it.
5. Quit all Office apps
6. Launch Terminal.app
7. Type the command defaults write com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts -array "postscript name 1" "postscript name 2" "etc." and hit return to run it. Postscript names here are case-sensitive and must match exactly what Font Book.app provides. You can specify up to 50 names. e.g. defaults write com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts -array "Helvetica-Light" "Helvetica" "Helvetica-LightOblique" "TimesNewRomanPSMT"
8. Launch your Office apps. One your apps have loaded, quit your Microsoft Office apps and relaunch them a second time to see your updated fonts list.

My advice

For general Shantell Sans use, if you have downloaded the font from this GitHub repo (not from e.g. Google Fonts, where the fonts are modified a bit), I would recommend the following for general MS Office use:

defaults write com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts -array "ShantellSansNormal-Regular" "ShantellSansNormal-Italic" "ShantellSansNormal-Bold" "ShantellSansNormal-BoldItalic"

If you want the multiple variants of Shantell Sans, you can change "Normal" in the above command to "Informal", "Bouncy", and/or "InformalBouncy", e.g. ShantellSansInformalBouncy-Regular etc.

For Shantell Sans Variable, the basic postscript names are slightly simpler, so if you only wish to install the variable font for some reason, you could use:
defaults write com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts -array "ShantellSans-Regular" "ShantellSans-Italic" "ShantellSans-Bold" "ShantellSans-BoldItalic"