Why are fonts not displaying properly in your PowerPoint presentation?

If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone about why your presentation looks different on their computer than it does on yours, then you’ve probably encountered this strange quirk of PowerPoint.

When a presentation is using a font that you don’t have installed on your computer, PowerPoint will automatically substitute the font for another, to keep the presentation usable and editable.

Sometimes it will find and use a very similar font, but not always - it will depend heavily on the specific font and also whether the PANOSE, Charset, and Pitch Family* information is available.

* metadata describing the font characteristics that can be used to choose a similar replacement.

Generally speaking, though it is very likely that the characters and spacing will be slightly different, causing text to wrap differently, or even overrun, changing the visual look of the presentation, sometimes dramatically. See this example below using the MetaOT-Black font.

Original presentation with MetaOT-Black installed

Presentation on a computer without the MetaOT-Black font

As you can see above, the font is still reported as MetaOT-Black, but the text in the box is no longer displayed using that font. The fact that PowerPoint gives no clue in its UI that it has silently replaced a font, can cause all manner of problems. Imagine delivering a presentation design to a client, only to receive lots of feedback about changing layout that doesn’t make sense when you look at the source file. If you and your client are looking at different layouts without realizing it, then a lot of time will be wasted.

Why does PowerPoint substitute fonts?

The original font is written into the file’s XML. When opening on a system without the font, PowerPoint automatically displays using a similar font but does not change the font that is specified in the XML. This allows the person without the original font to make reasonable edits to the presentation, as they will be able to see and edit the text normally. When they then send the file back to the originator, the presentation will still be using the original font.

If PowerPoint changed the underlying font then it would cause a fresh problem when sharing the file back with the originator. If they didn’t choose to display an alternative font, anyone without the font would be prevented from making edits to the text. It makes sense why they chose to take this approach. However, it perhaps would have been better if they could also indicate when it had happened, to minimize any confusion.

What can you do?

Embed fonts

If you are the owner of the original file then you can embed fonts in order to send them with the file and prevent the font being substituted on other machines - we have some follow-along instructions on how to embed fonts here. It’s worth noting that this will increase the size of the file, sometimes considerably.

This won’t always be an option though, not all fonts can be embedded, due to licensing restrictions or technical limitations.

Use Slidewise

With the Slidewise PowerPoint add-in you can say goodbye to this particular problem. Slidewise will alert you if any fonts have been substituted when you open a presentation - like this:

Opening a font in Slidewise, you can see every affected shape and jump straight to it in the presentation. If the font is one that can be shared, you can easily request it or download and install it yourself, so that the presentation can be viewed as intended.

If it is a font that can be embedded, you can ask the originator to embed the font and resupply the file. Or if it doesn’t matter, you can make your edits using the substituted font, but at least you won’t be confused about any layout or text presentation issues.

What’s more, with Slidewise, it is child's play to replace all fonts in PowerPoint at once if you don’t need them anymore.

Watch Slidewise replace all the fonts in this file in just a few seconds.

With Slidewise at your side, you’ll never fall prey to this issue again. Download your free 30-day trial and give it a go today.