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Some font names are too long to be displayed in Word's font-selection box in the ribbon. (I'm on Windows and have the same issue with any post-ribbon version of Word. I suspect the same issues exist in the other Office programs.) This is very often the case with professional fonts such as those synced from Adobe Typekit. For example, here's how "FreightText Pro Semibold" displays in the ribbon:

view of incomplete font name in Word ribbon

The view is the same if you view the right-click context menu or add the font selector to the Quick Access Toolbar. Unfortunately, even going into the drop-down selection menu does not tell you which specific font is currently in use:

drop-down font selection with no font highlighted

If the font you're trying to identify appears in the recently used fonts list, it does highlight the font in the list:

font selector with recent font highlighted

This is pretty limiting: the font has to be recently used, and the highlighting goes away with a twitch of the mouse. So the only consistent way I have of knowing what font is in use is to select and copy the font name and then paste it somewhere where I can read it. As a workaround, I could shorten the names in the font files, but that won't work for Typekit files that are synced rather than traditionally installed.

The ideal solution for me would be to remove the "Change Case" and "Clear All Formatting" buttons from their place in the ribbon and allow the font selector and font size menus to fill that horizontal space. By following the instructions at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Customize-the-ribbon-in-Office-00f24ca7-6021-48d3-9514-a31a460ecb31 (basically right-click anywhere in the ribbon, choose "Customize the Ribbon," and make selections), I was able to create a new group, but unfortunately, the font selector doesn't resize along with the window size even though other commands do (and it doesn't matter if the font selector is the only command in the group):

custom command group in the ribbon

I think any solution will be less than ideal, but I'm open to suggestions! I just want to see at a glance what font I'm using.

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  • In case anyone else thought a custom tab might fix this... It doesn't.
    – Michael Frank
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 22:36

1 Answer 1

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If you go into the customUI.xml file for your ribbon, you can add a sizeString tag to widen the dropdown. For example:

<comboBox idMso="Font" visible="true" sizeString="WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW"/>

It will widen the dropdown (and item selected text will display if you make it wide enough) but the dropdown list itself will still cut off text so scrolling down list with mouse will still be missing text until you select, but if you scroll through list using the up/down arrow keys instead the text at top of list will change as you scroll showing full text.

enter image description here

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  • I love the direction of this solution but need more info to implement it. After using Word options to customize the ribbon, I found Word.officeUI in AppData, but there is no comboBox element in that file. How do I create (or find) the correct file and edit it in the way you've shown?
    – Robert H.
    Commented Feb 27, 2018 at 23:45
  • I always do my customisations in a separate template. To see how to create a template and then customise the ribbon XML, see msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa434077(v=office.12).aspx. That has extra bits re VBA code you won't need. To customise XML for EXISTING ribbon tabs, see msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338202(v=office.12).aspx for some example coding which you can incorporate into your new template.
    – Tanya
    Commented Feb 28, 2018 at 2:53

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