Another support incident report from Marc and Peirce… Last week we were assisting a Sinhala user who was having trouble selecting Sinhala fonts in Microsoft Word 2003 on WIndows XP: no matter which font they chose, it would switch back to "KaputaUnicode" as soon as they started typing in Sinhala. We started by trying to reproduce the issue here, without success. No matter what we did, it just worked for us.
Eventually we decided to disable most of the Microsoft Office Language Settings in order to get a basic failure. After removing all languages but English (US) and English (Australia), we were able to reproduce the problem: no matter which Sinhala font we chose, Word would switch back to KaputaUnicode.
Then we tried installing the logical language settings using the MIcrosoft Office Language Settings (MOLS) tool. We added "Sinhalese (limited support)", Tamil and Hindi, but none of these made any apparent diference. I stopped and tried to remember which other languages I had previously configured in the MOLS tool when things were working for us. There were a whole lot of languages from all over the world: which one would make the difference?
I took a somewhat educated guess, and added Hebrew. Loaded Word and tried my sample Sinhala sentence again. Success! It worked! I could now choose any of the Sinhala Unicode fonts and type with them. Would you have guessed that?