PowerPoint fonts substituted? — Not if you do it this way
All those wickedly weird fonts we so love…
All those wickedly weird and beautiful fonts you can obtain online are great for jazzing up your PowerPoint presentation. Used sparingly of course. A carved woodblock font for a western theme. A dripping blood font for a Halloween series. A handwritten font for a comic book deck. It’s very tempting. Who wouldn’t like the potential for an emotional connection to occur during your presentation.
Wickedly weird and beautiful fonts
Here are the reasons you shouldn’t (but below, how you can solve this issue):
- Not really recommended to use non-standard “weird” Windows fonts
- PPT will substitute fonts if they are not on a user’s system, often with disastrous results
- “Your weird font” is not a standard Windows font, the set rarely resides on a PC, desktop or laptop at the venue where you will be showing your slide deck
- See the “SAFE FONTS” list below, and choose one of the highlighted fonts, then I can guarantee good results. These fonts are present on all operating systems, regardless of the age of the computer
- Better safe and boring than sorry. It is risky for a large organization’s branding, wonky results at the last minute are not good if the fonts don’t reside on the projection PC
- If you were to buy “Your weird font” for the company, not all fonts embed well within PowerPoint, even when PPT says that it can, PPT won’t even warn you that it can’t embed a font
- You have to teach all your employees/employers on how to install, embed/troubleshoot non-standard fonts
- Usually 1MB extra to the PowerPoint file size, to embed a font (if it works)
- Some fonts don’t even have all the required character sets
- Theme files (.THMX for use in Excel and Word) don’t support embedding of fonts, they must be system fonts
- It gets risky to keep uniformity across the company. If you email a presentation, the receiving person may not have the font on their system, and they will get font substitution occurring on screen
- Even if you bought a font for the company, everyone would need it installed on their systems
- Your designers could not be legally given a copy, they would need to buy a set
- If there is only one person using the presentation, and one laptop, by all means, buy, install and use any font you desire!
- As you can see from the above, I’ve come across this issue many times. Best to choose one of the fonts in the table below. But that’s boring. Yet safe for a corporation of hundreds of users.
Safe Windows PC fonts
Here are the ways you can solve this issue in PowerPoint:
Can’t help but have an emotional reaction to those wonderfully weird fonts. Designers know that.
If you can guarantee that a font is present on all the computers where your presentation will be shown, by all means, do it!
Otherwise, here’s a quick fix: Copy your text box and paste as picture.
In the screen grab below, the text box above the slide area contains both Wassau font and Kailey the Beautiful. Definitely not standard Windows fonts. Select your problematic text box and copy it (not the text itself).
Select the text box, not the text itself. Copy.
Paste it back onto the same slide, but choose “Paste as Picture”. That’s it!
Choose “Paste as picture”
The resulting paste is a clear PNG image, that will not skew up your presentation’s look and feel.
If you need to further edit the text content, down the road, keep that text box, just off screen. Repeat the process as required. Copy it and paste the picture on the slide area.
Champagne Design — PowerPoint Design 