In Word 2016, direct formatting text with

looks identical to the regular typeface:



In Word 2013, they look different (as expected).

Has anybody else noticed this? Is this issue restricted to Book Antiqua Bold, or have people noticed it with other fonts?

An update on this.

Word 2016 only renders it in bold if there is a <w:b/>. It inserts this automatically when you select the bold variant in the advanced font dialog.

If you remove the <w:b/>, 2016 displays it in regular font face; my 2010 and 2013 still use the bold variant (which is what I'd expect, given the specified font is "Book Antiqua Bold").

The same behaviour occurs with Calibri Bold and Times New Roman Bold.

My colleague has a Win 7 machine on which his Word 2013 apparently behaves the same as my Word 2016! So I'm not sure what controls this; I'm going to play with the compatibility settings next... nope, that doesn't seem to affect things.

test docx attached

Attached Files

Bug_Word2016_BookAntiquaBold_WTF.docx (12.0 KB, 7 views)

It'd be great if people with Word 2010 or 2013 could open the attached docx, and let me know whether they see any bold content or not?

In Word Options > Advanced > Show document content, there is a "font substitution" button.

When I click that, my Word 2013 says "Book Antiqua Bold" is a missing document font, and that it is substituting "default". This is a misleading dialog, since my Word 2013 does in fact use "Book Antiqua Bold" (both in the UI and its PDF output).

Compare my Word 2016, which says "Book Antiqua Bold" is a missing document font, but that it is substituting "Book Antiqua", which it will display and use.

So in both cases it says the bold variant of the font is missing (even though it is in Windows\Fonts); what differs between Word versions is what it does about it!

I guess this same behaviour happens with any font in the font dir that has "bold" or italic or bold/italic styles. Is this behaviour documented anywhere?