Fonts in Word Splash Screens

The opening screen that you see when you start Word is called a splash screen. (Most programs have a splash screen that inform you the program has started.) This splash screen consists of a graphic display, along with some textual information that is displayed. This information includes the name of the person to whom this copy of Word is licensed. If you look carefully from one system to another, you may notice differences in the font used to display the textual information on the splash screen.

The font used for the splash screen is supplied to Word by the operating system. This is done through a programming function call that requests a font based on its characteristics, not by name. For instance, Word may request a font that is sans-serif in a certain point size, rather than requesting Arial or Helvetica. Windows then provides the first font it locates that meets the terms of the request. The fonts that are available on any particular computer system, and the order in which they are available to the operating system, depends on the order in which the fonts were first installed. (Many fonts are installed by applications, so it also depends on the order in which your applications were installed.)

In older versions of Windows (pre 95), the fonts are stored in the WIN.INI file. This is an ASCII file which you can edit to change the order in which the fonts are listed. Thus, you can "play around" with the WIN.INI file to see if changing the font order changes the font used in the Word splash screen. Starting with Windows 95, however, (and definitely with Windows NT), the font lists began to be stored in the Registry. The order in which information is stored in the Registry is not related to how that information is displayed in the Registry Editor (where individual data is always presented alphabetically). The Registry Editor does not provide a way to view the stored order or change that order.