Recently, one of my customers had a problem with the font he needed not showing up in all applications. In this particular case, he wanted to use the Symbol font as part of a Keynote presentation he was preparing but it did not appear in Keynote’s font list.
Meanwhile, the Symbol font did appear in PowerPoint 2016’s font list.
Meanwhile, it was possible to copy and paste text using that font from PowerPoint and into Keynote, but then the font list in Keynote showed a blank entry in place of the name of the font.
What was going on? For more details, see below the jump.
After some research, I found an answer. It appears that applications which display this behavior try to display the font’s name using the font. If that’s not possible using Latin alphabet characters, they are left off of the font list.
Symbol uses Greek alphabet characters instead of Latin alphabet characters, so affected applications may not be able to display the font’s name.
In my testing, I found that both Apple’s Keynote and TextEdit applications were affected by this behavior. This character difference explains why the Symbol font showed up as a blank entry in Keynote and was otherwise not selectable from the Keynote font list.
The workaround for affected applications is to use the Fonts palette window to select the affected fonts:
1. Open the application in question.
2. Select the Format menu.
3. Under the Format menu, select Font then Show Fonts
4. The Fonts palette window should appear. All fonts should be displayed and be selectable via the Fonts palette.
