If Microsoft Word and PowerPoint don’t recognize fonts styles other than bold or italic even if other styles are installed, there is a hack.
I found the perfect font to use for titles in a presentation, Raleway Semi-bold. I installed it and when I went back to PowerPoint, I had two options: bold and italic. So, where’s semi-bold? A quick search found that it’s a MS-Office problem. A hack around it was to remove all other variations of the bold font, except for the semi-bold. This would be great unless I wanted to use the actual bold font. My solution was to rename the Semi-Bold Raleway font and install it as a “new” font.
Installing Font Variations for Word/PowerPoint
1. Install FontForge.
FontForge is an open source font editor.
2. Using FontForge, Rename Semi-Bold Raleway
For ease, create a directory on the desktop called Raleway Tracks. In this directory, put a copy of Raleway-SemiBold.ttf.
Navigate to the desktop folder and open Raleway-SemiBold.ttf.
This opens the main font editor window.
From the menu bar, select Element > Font Info…
Under PS Names, change:
Fontname: Tracks-SemiBold.
Family Name: Tracks
Name For Humans: Tracks SemiBold
Click [OK].
Now, you’re going to get a little popup to change the UniqueID. Go ahead and [Change].
Back in the main window, select File > Generate Fonts…
Press [Generate].
Ignore the error message. Press [Generate].
If everything went right, you should now have a “new” font called Tracks-SemiBold.tff in the Raleway Tracks directory.
3. Install Tracks-SemiBold Font.
Double click on the .tff file and press [Install].
Now, you have Raleway-SemiBold.tff to use whenever your little heart desires… except it’s named Tracks.