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PowerPoint And Fonts
by Geetesh Bajaj
The Basics
The Rules of Fonts
Font Embedding
Convert Type To Vectors
Font Smoothing
Replace Fonts
Dingbat Bullets
Many Fonts Can Crash...
The Basics
A font or typestyle can cause an impact, set a mood or extend
a character of a presentation.
It's important to be aware of the basic text possibilities in
PowerPoint before formatting your fonts - read more about that
in Indezine's PowerPoint And Text page.
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The Rules Of Fonts
Freedom without constraints is an important consideration - at
times rules can hamper creativity and prevent brilliant ideas.
So, the first rule of fonts is ironically to break all rules.
The second rule is to realize that if your broken rules sever
a visual balance - then be generous enough to admit your mistake
and stick to the written rules of typography.
Let's look at other rules now.
- Avoid using more than two typestyles within a presentation.
This of course excludes dingbats.
- Unlike in the printed world - presentations can have two sans
serif fonts - in fact your titles and body text can both be composed
of sans serifs.
- Try using font sizes which remain legible from all perceived
angles and distances.
- Don't overload a slide with text in small sizes - try dividing
the content into two or more slides.
- For copyright notices and other legal stuff, you can use a
smaller font - but don't use something very tiny and illegible
- you don't want the audience to squint their eyes trying to
read the text!
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Font Embedding in PowerPoint
PowerPoint allows you to embed a copy of a font used in a presentation
within its format. But that's not the end of the story - things
are not quite that simple. Anyway, let's find out how to embed
fonts before discussing its aspects.
This can be achieved by File -> Save As and then checking the
'Embed True Type Fonts' option. If a font cannot be embedded, PowerPoint
will inform you accordingly.
Not all TrueType fonts can be embedded - and Type 1 or PostScript
fonts cannot be embedded at all.
To find out if a particular font is embeddable, you can get a
free extension from the Microsoft Typography site. It's called
the Font
Properties Extension and once it has been installed, you can
right click any font in your Windows Font folder (normally C:\Windows\Fonts,
but your path may differ) and select 'Properties'. The resultant
properties box is full of tabs which provide all kinds of information
about the font in question. This includes its embedding rights.
Microsoft also provides a Font
Properties Editor at its site - although this allows you
to make a font's embedding rights more restrictive, it doesn't
allow you to allot embedding rights to an already restricted
font.
If you create your own fonts using Macromedia Fontographer, you
will find a technical
note at the Macromedia site which speaks about editing font
properties.
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Convert Type To Vectors
Quite often, you are faced with a situation where a font does
not allow embedding. Alternatively, you've used a few characters
of a font in question, and embedding the font balloons up the presentation
file size beyond expected proportions.
In that case, you can typeset the particular font in a vector
graphics program like CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia
Freehand/Flash, Deneba Canvas or Xara X. The text could be exported
to a capable vector format like EMF or WMF - this could be then
imported as a graphic in PowerPoint - which would automatically
be embedded within a presentation.
Such a graphic can be animated like any other PowerPoint object
- in fact even ungrouped, re-coloured and edited within the confines
of the PowerPoint interface.
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Font Smoothing
Font Smoothing is a feature which Microsoft released initially
in the Windows 95 Plus Pack. The feature was incorporated in the
main operating system in later versions of Windows.
The Font Smoother is available as a free download from the Microsoft
site.
The article - Smooth
Fonts at the Microsoft Typography site explains the entire
concept.
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Replace Fonts
Sometimes you are faced with a peculiar situation - you've used
a particular font nowhere in the presentation and on saving the
presentation, PowerPoint brings forth a warning which in effects
says that this font cannot be embedded!
In such a situation, go to Format -> Replace Fonts and select
the offending font in the 'Replace' drop down list. In the 'With'
drop down list, select a safe font you've used elsewhere in a presentation.
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Dingbat Bullets
Dingbat fonts are a lot of fun - you can never have enough of
them! Many of them are simple in character, and make excellent
bullets for a bulleted list in a PowerPoint presentation.
For instance - you're creating a presentation for an ice cream
industry - and you substitute the boring round bullet with another
one symbolizing a scoop of ice cream. Interesting, but dangerous
if you go overboard!
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Many Fonts Can Crash ...
You've got too many fonts installed - and certain components of
PowerPoint like the Organization Chart are giving you nightmares.
This particular program crashes every time you use it!
The solution is simple - reduce the number of fonts installed
to a more manageable level.
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