Level 4

2,096 points

MS Sans Serif font missing

I receive a regular club bulletin which is in MS Sans Serif.

When I open it with Pages I get a warning that MS Sans Serif is missing, and I replace it with Microsoft Sans Serif.

But, neither before or after replacing it, is the pagination as the author intended. It is not the same as when opened in LibreOffice for example.

Is there any way I can download MS Sans Serif and have Pages use it?

Or any other way round this problem for Pages? or do I have to use LibreOffice

Thanks

Posted on Feb 24, 2012 10:52 PM

36 replies

Mike Boreham Author

Level 4

2,096 points

Feb 25, 2012 10:02 PM in response to Dale Gillard

Thanks Dale,

Yes I have tried substituting those fonts, but doesn't solve the pagination problem.

I am quite sure the person producing the bulletin doesn't use MS Sans Serif from any conscious or deliberate choice. It will be an accident of history. The "bulletin" is a lot of match results (chess) and league tables. I expect the current controller modifies last weeks bulletin, going back to something he inherited from his predecessor, who inherited from his etc.etc.

However your comment that MS Sans Serif is 'old' has encouraged me to suggest to the author, as everyone else in the thread has said, that he uses a more modern font. Presumably Microsoft Sans Serif is more modern, and is in OSX/Pages. Would that be an appropriate suggestion?

Thanks

fruhulda

Level 6

15,167 points

Feb 26, 2012 12:00 AM in response to Mike Boreham

Sometime you get extra Page breaks when converting a .doc document in Pages. Hunt for those and you pagination might work better.

Try to substitute the font with one of the monospaced on Mac. Courier, Monaco or Andale Mono.

Mike Boreham Author

Level 4

2,096 points

Feb 26, 2012 12:39 AM in response to fruhulda

Thanks,

I tried those three without any improvement.

As you said earlier having the right font doesn't guarantee everything is correct when converting between programmes.

I tried looking for page breaks, but not sure what I am looking for, or what I would do with one when I found it. If it is a matter of editting page breaks in Pages to achieve correct pagination every time, my feeling is that my current easy workaround of opening it in LibreOffice would be a lot easier.

Feb 26, 2012 12:41 AM in response to Mike Boreham

Pages is rather appropriate as a final program, not for exchanging data. Definitely, LibreOffice deals better with doc and docx files than Pages. If you open those file in LibreOffice and they look better than a Pages import, it is clear that this is the best solution for you; or to purchase the Office version for mac.

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Feb 26, 2012 3:28 AM in response to Mike Boreham

As far as I know, if MS Sans Serif is not available on your mac (which is normal) it will not behave better than Pages.

M…oSoft itself dropped MS Sans Serif in Windows Seven.

If you search on the net, you will find sites offering the named font but, as they required a registration I didn't downloaded it.

Here are quite every monospaced fonts which I installed here.

Maybe you will be interested by some of them :

Andale Mono (659 glyphs)

AurulentSansMono-Regular (267 glyphs)

Consolas (2731 glyphs)

DejaVu Sans Mono (3161 glyphs)

Droid Sans Mono (612 glyphs)

Free Monospaced (2576 glyphs)

Latin Modern Mono 10 Regular (740 glyphs)

Latin Modern Mono Light 10 Regular (740 glyphs)

Latin Modern Mono Light Cond 10 Regular (740 glyphs)

Liberation Mono (663 glyphs)

Menlo Regular (3157 glyphs)

monofur (675 glyphs)

Monoxil (275 glyphs)

OCR A Std (270 glyphs)

Prestige Elite Std (374 glyphs)

TeX Gyre Cursor (1242 glyphs)

Tiger (1388 glyphs)

Tiger Expert (1172 glyphs)

Verily Serif Mono (244 glyphs)

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 26 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Feb 27, 2012 6:10 AM in response to Mike Boreham

Hi Mike

The author of the bulletin *may* be using MS Sans Serif for match results (chess) and league tables in the newsletter because it is a fixed width font. That is, it'd let him/her set out tables of data so that they line up vertically. If you do suggest the author use another font, and this is why MS Sans Serif is used, you may need to suggest a fixed width font that's available on both platforms eg Courier, etc.

Cheers.

Dale

Mike Boreham Author

Level 4

2,096 points

Feb 27, 2012 7:14 AM in response to KOENIG Yvan

Thanks everyone.

I feel the "solutions" are potentially disproportionate to the problem!

I started the thread thinking that it might be a simple matter of installing MS Sans Serif in OSX/Pages once, and thereafter I wouldn't have the minor annoyance of opening this bulletin in LibreOffice to get the pagination right when printing it out.

Anything involving editting the document each week in Pages, by substituting fonts or moving page breaks is a non starter option, compared to the simple LibreOffice method. (In spite of saying that, I did try the other suggested fonts and page breaks but couldn't get Pages to display the pagination right).

I realise I have had the benefit of inputs from world experts in Pages, for which I am really grateful, but there obviously isn't a simple apply-once solution (or even an apply-every-time solution).

I am quite sure the person doing the bulletins has no idea why he is using MS Sans Serif. The fact that it has been dropped from Windows 7 is a good reason for suggesting he uses a different font (eg Courier as Dale suggested), but from other things I have learned here, this is no guarantee that the pagination will be correct when Pages opens it.

Thanks again for the inputs.

Feb 27, 2012 7:58 AM in response to KOENIG Yvan

Yvan, MS Sans Serif is installed by default with any Mac OS X released over the last years, and makes part of MS font set included in Mac OS X too. This MS set includes Arial, Tahoma, TNR, Verdana and some others I forgot.

Feb 27, 2012 9:04 AM in response to KOENIG Yvan

What is MS REFERENCE Sans Serif? there is no Reference here, it is MS Sans Serif pure and simple.

As far as I remember MS Sans Serif has been a constant component of any Mac OS x installation over the last decades. I have always had it in the basic installation set.

PS. I have just had a look at my daughter’s new mini with Lion preinstalled, MS Sans Serif is of course there.

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Feb 27, 2012 9:56 AM in response to Cattus Thraex

It exists a font really named MS Sans Serif.

It's a monospaced one but Micosoft Sans Serif is not a monospaced font.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 27 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Feb 27, 2012 10:33 AM in response to fruhulda

Hello Fruhulda

I'm a bit puzzled. In the first messages the font was described as monospaced but it's described as proportional in the linked web page.

In an other page I saw that it was resembling to Tahoma which is proportional too.

So, at this time, there is only one thing which is sure :

MS Sans Serif is not the same font than Microsoft Sans Serif (Most of the time I don't write the name of this company but I made a typo in my late message so it's fair to write it correctly this time) 😉

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 27 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Feb 28, 2012 5:46 AM in response to Dale Gillard

You are of course right, but note that they are different generations of the same (basic) font. MS SS is the initial, old, version of the newer Microsoft SS.

To note that there are DIFFERENT versions of Times New Roman (hereafter TNR) even if IN THE SAME GENERATION. For example, Leopard and newer Mac OS versions install a TNR version which has a richer repertoire than the version installed by MS Office for mac, and which is, in fact, another version of TNR, with many and essential differences.

And, last but not least, MS SS and the newer M$ SS do not intefere on the same installation, as the old generation is not installed any more. So, because the discussion started from here, if a text still uses the old MS SS, which has been replaced by the newer generation of M$ SS, then there may be of course problems related to text flow. The same if TNR is used, because, even if having the same, identical name, and produced and distributed by MS, one may have big trouble with TNR, the more so as they are all labelled identically.

There are also several generarions of Arials and Tahomas and... , which also lead to similar problems.

I added this comment just for the sake of informing all those interested in this issue.

Ditto.

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Feb 28, 2012 6:10 AM in response to Cattus Thraex

Hello Cattus.

The OP's problem was clearly described in his first message :

Mike Boreham

25 févr. 2012 07:52

I receive a regular club bulletin which is in MS Sans Serif.

When I open it with Pages I get a warning that MS Sans Serif is missing, and I replace it with Microsoft Sans Serif.

Even a ten years old child is able to understand that the problem was the unavailability of the MS Sans Serif font.

You are the only one refusing to understand that.

You wrote several times that MS Sans Serif is delivered with the system and is available on your daughter's machine which is perfectly wrong.

I apologize but I hoped a better understanding from somebody whose profile claims :

Biography:

Professor of Czech and English; writer; linguist (comparative grammar of Slavic within an Indo-European context and in a larger Euro-Asiatic context)

Expertise:

Czech and Slavic languages; comparative grammar; southeast Europe; substratum languages.

Occupation:

professor

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 28 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Feb 28, 2012 7:07 AM in response to KOENIG Yvan

Of course, MS Sans Serif, i.e. the old M$ font of this series, is not available any more, because MS, as far as I remember, never distributed both generations at the same time, the newer generation replaced the older one some 10 years ago. Perhaps for some time they interlaced—

More complicated is the problem with different fonts having the same, identical name, which are also DIFFERENT fonts. I do not know whether this is clear to a 10 or 100 year human, I just wished to note that detail, which is a lot more confusing than the unavailability of the old MS SS.

And, yes, I do know something about fonts, without being an expert. 13 years ago I created my first and unique font labelled Gimbutas, I still have it. It is a summary of Neolithic signs, something also good for a 10-year girl.

Otherwise I must thank you for you flesh-cut words, they are instructive and, with their genuine superciliousness, absolutely charming.

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Feb 28, 2012 12:39 PM in response to Cattus Thraex

As I wrote a few times, I'm not here to be charming or pleasant.

The fact that different fonts may have the same name is due to the fact that freedom is the rule.

Everybody may build a font and give it a name which is already used.

But, even if this problem is confusing, it's not the asker's one and we are supposed to help him, not list our problems.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 28 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

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MS Sans Serif font missing