Embedding fonts in a presentation with non-standard fonts

Are you a font freak? Do you just LOVE interesting fonts? I must admit that I’m a font idiot who can hardly tell the difference between Arial, Tahoma and Verdana, unless they’re right next to each other. Even then, I won’t know which is which. Designers are horrified when I tell them this!

Fonts can be fun, but you have to be careful with them:

• They must be legible!
• They shouldn’t distract from your message
• They aren’t necessarily available from every computer

It can be horrible when you open a presentation on another computer and the fonts are all wrong!

What to do?

Stick with safety

You can stick with fonts that are standard on all or most computers. Even then, if you have to switch between PC and Mac, you’ll find that text renders differently and takes up a different amount of space. For example, a line of text will wrap differently — and probably look awful!

Embed fonts

PowerPoint lets you embed fonts. This means that the fonts are embedded in the presentation file and another computer should be able to display them.  There are some limitations. For example, this process only works for TrueType fonts (TTF) and OpenType fonts (OTF). Here’s the technique:

1. Choose File> Options.
2. Click Save
3. Check the Embed Fonts in the File checkbox.
4. Choose to embed only the characters used or all characters.
5. Click OK.

You may get a cryptic message that some of your fonts cannot be saved with the presentation. Here’s one that I saw

Brush Script Std: Reason: General Failure

But this technique can work well. Here you see the difference in 2 slides, with and without embedding.

Without embedding

After embedding fonts

Use a picture

Another technique is to use an image instead. The image at the top of this blog post was done like that. It’s made up of a shape and text boxes, but I selected them all, right-clicked, and chose Save as Picture. Then I inserted the picture. In this way, I knew that it would look the same on any device.

Have you had font woes? How did you solve them? Leave a comment!