Creating a Document Font List

Word allows you to use the fonts that are installed on the system you are using. Fonts are installed within Windows, so that they are available not just to Word, but to all programs installed on your system.

When you are creating a document on your system, it is easy to know what fonts are being used—the list of fonts is limited to those available on the system. If you receive a document from a different person, however, the other person's system may have different fonts installed than you do. This means that their Word document could be formatted with fonts you don't even have on your system.

If you want to generate a list of fonts used within a document (as opposed to a list of fonts available on a system), you have a couple of choices. First of all, you can open the Word document in a text editor and look around in the parts of the document you don't normally see in Word. Near the end of the file you should see a list of fonts used in the document. If you do this, however, you should be very careful to not make any changes to the Word document while it is open in your text editor. Doing so can easily make the document no longer usable in Word.

A Word-based solution is to simply look through each character in a document and check out what font is used to format the character. A character-by-character approach is necessary because each character could be formatted with a different font, and VBA doesn't allow you to access a fonts collection in relation to the document itself—it seems that no such collection is maintained. Thus, the safest (and slowest) method is to simply step through each character and create your own list. The following VBA macro accomplishes the task:

Public Sub ListFontsInDoc()
    Dim FontList(199) As String
    Dim FontCount As Integer
    Dim FontName As String
    Dim J As Integer, K As Integer, L As Integer
    Dim X As Long, Y As Long
    Dim FoundFont As Boolean
    Dim rngChar As Range
    Dim strFontList As String

    FontCount = 0
    X = ActiveDocument.Characters.Count
    Y = 0
    ' For-Next loop through every character
    For Each rngChar In ActiveDocument.Characters
        Y = Y + 1
        FontName = rngChar.Font.Name
        StatusBar = Y & ":" & X
        ' check if font used for this char already in list
        FoundFont = False
        For J = 1 To FontCount
           If FontList(J) = FontName Then FoundFont = True
        Next J
        If Not FoundFont Then
            FontCount = FontCount + 1
            FontList(FontCount) = FontName
        End If
    Next rngChar

    ' sort the list
    StatusBar = "Sorting Font List"
    For J = 1 To FontCount - 1
        L = J
        For K = J + 1 To FontCount
            If FontList(L) > FontList(K) Then L = K
        Next K
        If J <> L Then
            FontName = FontList(J)
            FontList(J) = FontList(L)
            FontList(L) = FontName
        End If
    Next J

    StatusBar = ""
    ' put in new document
    Documents.Add
    Selection.TypeText Text:="There are " & _
      FontCount & " fonts used in the document, as follows:"
    Selection.TypeParagraph
    Selection.TypeParagraph
    For J = 1 To FontCount
        Selection.TypeText Text:=FontList(J)
        Selection.TypeParagraph
    Next J
End Sub

Obviously, the longer your document, the longer it will take the macro to finish. (I ran the macro on an 1,100 page document and it took approximately 46 minutes. On a 5 page document it took less than a minute.) When done, the macro creates a new document that contains a sorted list of the fonts used.