I had a Word document with extra font formatting buried in it. The primary font for the entire document was incorporated properly, but when I converted the file to PDF, the PDF properties kept referencing a second font. Somewhere a rogue font was formatting sections of my Microsoft Word file. I dug through all the sections of the Word file and found a few references to this other font, but I couldn’t seem to eliminate it from the document. I was on the verge of tearing my hair out, when I realized, Find and Replace allows you to search for and replace fonts throughout your Word .doc and .docx files.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t care about an invisible font in a Word document, but it was keeping me from uploading the PDF I created into the Lulu.com print on demand service because this random font wasn’t actually embedded in the document even though it showed up in the PDF. Read on to see how I solved the problem.
First pull up the Find and Replace window in Microsoft Word, then start building your Font replacement.
Click the Format button and choose Font. With the Font window open, choose the font you want to remove from your Word document. next make sure all the check boxes in the effects section have a blue square inside them, so that Word will search everything.
Back in the Replace window, in the Find what section, you’re going to use the Special button at the bottom of the window to have Word look for things like Paragraph Mark, Any Character, White Space and other aspects that may be improperly formatted. You may have to cycle through these and click the Find Next button in order to find that rogue font. Once you have located something with the incorrect formatting, you can either manually change it, or you can use the Replace with tool to select a font and what you want to replace the inncorrect area with.
