When you use a unique font that is not a standard Windows or Office font, you risk suffering with the possible effects of font substitution occurring when your file is opened on another system. When font substitution takes place, the look of your presentation can change considerably. Parts of the text can become misaligned, text wrapping points may change, and special characters can turn into meaningless rectangles. To prevent font substitution from happening, you can try embedding the fonts to make sure the document looks the same on other computers. As a result, you minimize the risk of the fonts, layout, and styling of the presentation changing. Without using the embed feature, you may feel your only choice is to rely on sharing your file in only in pdf format because pdfs allow you lock down the look of the document. But pdfs suffer from the disadvantage of not allowing full editing rights and not being able to play your animations.
How do I embed a font in PowerPoint?
To turn on embedding you need to activate that option. Keep in mind that the file size will increase typically by several megabytes for each font embedded.
Click on File tab and then select Options.
Select the Save category on the left hand side.
At the very bottom of the list of options on the right pane and under the heading Preserve fidelity when sharing this presentation, check the box labeled Embed fonts in the file.
Then click OK.
Are all fonts embeddable in PowerPoint?
No, please be aware of 2 very important features of a font that can limit your ability to embed it.
The font should be a TrueType (.TTF). Many Postscript/Type 1 and OpenType fonts do not support embedding.
Your licensing of the font must allow it to be embedded.
Font designers often will restrict the ability of a font to be embedded. This prevents unlicensed use of the font. Generally, if the font is purchased at a higher price point, the ability to have PowerPoint embeddability is unlocked.
Fonts can be purchased with 1 of 4 levels of embeddability:
Non-embeddable
Preview/Print
Editable
Installable
The levels of Editable and Installable allow the font characters to be embedded in PowerPoint.
To check what rights you have to a font: go to Control Panel in Windows and click Fonts. Clicking on the font shows the Font embeddability.
In the picture above, the Mickey Ears Regular font is shown as being Installable Therefore, this font can be embedded in PowerPoint and Word.
How do I check if embedding the font truly worked?
Unfortunately, you cannot tell directly from within PowerPoint. Be aware that just looking at the font named in the Font box does not help, because it will always show the name of the original font even if the system has no access to that font. The only way to way to investigate if the embedding truly worked is to use a workaround.
The only way to way to investigate if the embedding truly worked is by using a workaround through exporting the presentation as a pdf. For the workaround, you should launch your PowerPoint presentation from a computer that does not have the font(s) installed and save it as a pdf. Then compare the fonts listed in the pdf by Adobe Acrobat Reader or Adobe Acrobat to those listed in PowerPoint.
The complete steps to do the workaround are:
Save your PowerPoint at a pdf by:
Click on the File tab nd then select the Export category on the left hand side.
Click on Create PDF/XPS.
Give a file name for your presentation, then click Publish in the lower right corner.
Check the listing of the fonts in the pdf file by:
Open the pdf in Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat program.
Press Control + D together to open the Document Properties window.
Select the Font tab and you will see the list of fonts.
Check the listing of fonts in PowerPoint through the Replace Fonts window by:
On the Home tab, going to the editing group and selecting the drop down next to Replace.
Click on Replace Fonts.
Below is an example showing the two listing of fonts side by side. . By comparing the lists, you can see the Proxima Nova font is substituted in PowerPoint since it is not listed in the Adobe pdf list of fonts.
If I do not have rights to embed a font, how can I control the font substitution that occurs when I open my presentation on another computer where the custom font is not installed?
Unfortunately, with PowerPoint, you cannot control the font substitution. The algorithm that PowerPoint uses in selecting fonts to substitute is not completely known. Even with two systems that are completely identical and with both not possessing the original font, PowerPoint will not necessarily choose the same font on the two different systems.
How can I permanently convert a font to one that is commonly installed?
On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click on the drop down menu for Replace and select Replace Fonts.
In the Replace Font window, work with each font listed in the Replace box one at a time. If the font needs to be replaced with a more common font, select the replacement font in the With box and click on Replace.
The conversion will replace the fonts on:
Slides
Slide Masters and Layouts
Notes pages
Some embedded objects like pasted spreadsheets and graphs
Where can I find a list of Common fonts that would be safe to use with PowerPoint?
Safe fonts are those that are generally installed with either the Operating System or with the install of Microsoft Office.
These resource pages at Indezine.com and at Ampsoft.net list the fonts installed with the various versions of Microsoft Office. If you utilize one of the fonts that is predominantly used across the various versions of Office, you can be relatively sure that your presentation will not suffer any unintended consequences of font substitution taking place on other computers.
Does embedding in Word work the same way?
No, there are some important differences. Please read my other post on Word font embedding FAQs to discover how there are more direct tools to figure out Font Substitution in Word.
