PowerPoint Font Substitution Issues
Let's say you use a non-standard font, and that is any font that is not commonplace within PowerPoint or the Windows and Mac operating systems.
Next, open this presentation with the non-standard font on another computer which does not have the font installed, and PowerPoint provides no info regarding the missing font. In fact, it just uses another font to display the same text.
Why does it do so? There are multiple problems here:
The recipient has no clue that one font was substituted with another.
The font used as the substitute font cannot be identified.
Worse, open the presentation on two systems that don not have the font. PowerPoint will then choose two different fonts on those systems. Are we understanding this behavior pattern?
I've written a workaround to identify the substituted font at http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/learn/textandfonts/find-substituted-fonts.html -- but then this is not the solution!
11 comments
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Emily
commented
Save fonts regularly used when PC is shut down
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Virginia Catenazzi
commented
I totally agree I work for a translation company, and I cannot say when PowerPoint is changing fonts and the display now is not correct! We need a font substitution panel like Ms Word.
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Anonymous
commented
You used to be able to use the 'replace font' menu to identify missing fonts - a question mark would show up to the left of missing font names - that was useful - Office 365 doesn't show the question marks anymore!
Can this regression be fixed please? -
Laila Shoukry
commented
This is really a serious issue. Please fix soon.
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Anonymous
commented
Or, like a PDF, the PowerPoint presentation has the fonts embedded?
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Jodi Newell
commented
Dear Microsoft,
I work on one or two decks daily for an ad agency who has many clients, each with a PPT template that often uses non-standard fonts. There are 50 employees at the agency and who knows how many employees at each client. Any of which may be giving the presentations I work on. I design on a PC, many of my clients have Macs.
Not everyone at the agency has the client's fonts even though many of them review my work and give feedback. Not everyone at the agency's clients have the correct fonts either. In fact, because there is no warning that the deck uses fonts I don't have, there are times that even I, the designer, am not designing with the correct font. So many fonts look so similar to other fonts and it only takes a few pixels difference in font size to ruin a well designed layout or graphic. And it seems, even after all these many years, when I find a font or a bullet I can't edit, the last person to work on the deck uses a Mac.
No one quite 'gets' the fact that they need the correct fonts to review my work, no matter how many times I try to explain it to them. And eventually, usually in the eleventh hour, it all comes back to me, asking why text is oversized, undersized, falling off the slide, too bold, not bold enough. It's a damn mess! All because of font issues. The best I can do, is assure them, that I would never, ever, submit a job (assuming I have, or they have furnished me with, the correct fonts) a slide deck that was sloppy, with ill-fitting text and spacing issues.
Please, let us at least know we need a new font, without having to jump through hoops (thank you Geetesh, Steve and others for your work-arounds). But our clients, the end-user, need to have, from the very beginning, a clear message that they are not using the correct fonts. It makes no sense whatsoever for them to pay me for hours of design and formatting only to have it all ruined by the fact that the fonts do not look right in size or style.
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Donato Rios
commented
At least make font substitutions in parity with behavior in Word. An option to view the font substitution would be great. Making something like this completely opaque to the user is bad practice for a tool that is relied on for visualization across multiple machines that may have different font installations.
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Markus S
commented
Same opinion here: The user should be informed about the original and the replacement font.
Furthermore even if the "save fonts within the PowerPoint" was selected on the windows source presentation file, on the mac it looks always completely different.
that information window could at least help a lot. -
John Pease
commented
Totally agree - PowerPoint should include a warning when opening a file that it is substituting a font or fonts and highlight what font has been used to replace the non-system font.
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I love Microsoft
commented
There should be a warning when saving AND when opening a file with missing embedded fonts!
In the the window
FILE > Informations > (right) Vaues/extended Values > Tab: Content > "used fonts"
there should be an additional nfo, like "(embeded)/(standard font windows)/(local)" for every font.
I guess also a list of standard Microsoft and Apple fonts could provided there to support "normal" users. -
Tom
commented
I have this problem all the time. I design slides for my courses and when I am delivering them in my client's premises I normally use their equipment and computers which, of course, don't have some of the fonts I used. If I only use them for titles or in a few instances then I usually convert them to images. But that is not the solution!!!
