PowerPoint As soon as you open a file, you should get a message that tells you if any fonts are missing and which ones they are.
Font missing dialog box on opening.
Rob Butler
shared this idea
16 comments
-
Toni B
commented
Repeating this post from someone else as its so frustrating to have lost this option
-
Toni B
commented
Please bring back the icons next to the fonts that indicate whether or not they are available for output.
Please this a thousand times! It is massively frustrating not being able to tell if the font is the actual font originally used or has been replaced automatically. Also as mentioned below the replace fonts function is not specific enough thanks!
-
Graham Hannington
commented
See also: "As soon as you open a file, you should get a message that tells you if any fonts are missing and which ones they are."
-
Graham Hannington
commented
What Microsoft might call "graceful degradation of the user experience" (good), I call "silently failing" (bad).
Other applications, such as CorelDRAW, warn you when you open a document that uses fonts that you don't have.
In previous versions of PowerPoint, the font dropdown subtly indicated whether or not a font used by the current presentation was available. But not in current PowerPoint for Office 365.
The consequences of this font substitution (silent fallback) can range from almost-unnoticeable—to anyone except typophiles—to disastrous.
Yes, you can embed fonts when saving a .pptx. And I do that, if I'm sending people a presentation that uses "non-standard" fonts (where the definition of "non-standard" changes, depending on context).
But I can't force other people, in other organizations, to do that. When other people send my colleagues presentations that use fonts those colleagues don't have, it causes problems.
-
Emily Ethan
commented
You have explained it in a unique way. I would just want to add one thing here that if we use a unique font for our work like one that i have shared here then it will be very useful for every graphic designer. A unique font can be found here: https://fontsnetwork.com/futura-font
-
SandyTree
commented
There also should be an option to embed the fonts into the file, so you don't have to reinstall them whenever you open it on another computer :3
-
Michael
commented
Perhaps not a forced dialog box, as any dialog box that pops up on opening a presentation is inhibitive to work flow. Given modern design, perhaps a message in the yellow information bar that can appear below the ribbon for messages (eg when an Office Update is available), with a button to then display a dialog box listing the fonts.
Better yet, this should be a FONTS REPLACEMENT dialog box - I think OpenOffice Impress has this feature?
-
Anonymous
commented
This would make it much easier for people to understand why their presentation looks 'wrong'. Such a frequent issue these days with everyone wanting to differentiate themselves by using non standard fonts.
-
Lesley Ross
commented
This would save sooooo much time. Please do this.
-
Robert Stone
commented
Also a dialogue box to tell you which fonts are being used on which page and an easy way of deleting unused fonts (single & double byte). + The same listing for multimedia files
-
Betsy
commented
I manage templates for a company of 70+ people, and people have no idea what a specific font looks like, let alone if one is being automatically replaced by an available font when they don't have the right font installed. This is a very simple but very helpful feature. Please put it back...or at least provide a warning pop up of sorts that informs the user that the font being used is not installed (like Adobe products).
-
Anonymous
commented
Totally agree. And while we're at it, give us a way to jump to each instance of a given font. Sometimes there's just a few characters (or spaces) formatted in a font that we don't want, but we're afraid to use Replace Fonts because it might replace something we don't want replaced. Or we CAN'T use it because it won't replace double-byte (e.g. Japanese/Chinese/Korean/etc) fonts with our normal fonts.
-
Jill Gardner
commented
I am dumbfounded that Microsoft would remove this ability. It's bad enough they just substitute fonts with absolutely no warning but now users can't even easily identify what fonts they don't have for an outside presentation.
Not all fonts can be embedded so that is a useless suggestion. Even using the Replace Fonts dialog won't help because unless/until you know what is missing that is also useless.
So it is down to a visual inspection of each slide. Wow. Thanks for taking us back to the 90s Microsoft. -
Ute
commented
Though there are not many votes for this problem, it is nonetheless a very important one. It may not be used by the average PowerPoint user. But it is essential for those who create templates for other users and for those who work as presentation designers enhancing the slides of other users.
-
James Steel
commented
Just to point out, in PP 2013 you can change the save settings to embed true type fonts into the presentation.
-
888jay
commented
Through PowerPoint version 2010 the Replace Fonts dropdown showed icons for TrueType fonts and a question mark if the font was missing. THIS IS ESSENTIAL INFORMATION!!
If someone in one of our departments sends a PowerPoint file for printing, we have no way to know if the fonts they used are available within the file, or if a substitute font is being used. Printing output might look drastically different than what the author intended.
Please bring back the icons next to the fonts that indicate whether or not they are available for output.
