By Julie Terberg
Cloud fonts are here and the font story for PowerPoint has changed. No longer are we limited to a short list of fonts deemed safe for templates and shared presentations. In my previous post: An update on “safe fonts” for PowerPoint, I explained what safe fonts are and how to avoid font substitution when sharing files with others. That information still applies to folks using older versions of Office. If your company is using PowerPoint 2010, 2013, or 2016, for instance, you’ll want to stick to one of the font families listed at the end of that post. If you have any influence or say in the matter, upgrade to Office 365! The subscription is well worth it for all the new features in PowerPoint, including font availability. Note: Office 2019 is a standalone version and will not get regular updates with new features.
Cloud fonts are available to Office 365 subscribers on all platforms and devices. If you have Office 365, you’ll see them in your font list indicated by a cloud and arrow icon. When you apply one of these fonts PowerPoint downloads it in the background and applies it to your text. When someone views the file with Office 365 or Office 2019, PowerPoint downloads missing fonts from the font service and the file renders the same as it was authored, without embedding. The same is true when the file is opened with the PowerPoint mobile app (Android or iOS) or PowerPoint Online. There are more than 600 cloud fonts currently available, about 650MB in total file size. That’s an impractical amount to store on a mobile device so the cloud service downloads fonts as needed. Yes, you need an internet connection to see the cloud fonts, choose them, or download missing ones – the first time. Downloaded fonts are stored in cache and available to use in other Office apps. The fonts are cached as long as there is space and purged when there is need to save a new font. Because the fonts are cached and not stored in the Windows Fonts folder, you won’t be able to access them in other programs like the Adobe suite, for instance.
- Fortunately, you don’t have to replace fonts, one at a time with each text box, placeholder, or shape. In this tutorial, we will explore how you can replace one font with another, in the entire presentation using PowerPoint 365 for Mac: Open an existing presentation. We opened a presentation that uses two fonts, Arial and Baskerville Old Face.
- A custom font will only appear in your presentation if it is played on a device with that font installed. On any other device, PowerPoint will replace your beautiful, carefully planned custom font with one of the system defaults, and this can have disastrous consequences for your design.
Good Fonts For Powerpoints
Here’s a quick snapshot of how you can use cloud fonts with different Office versions:
The fonts will now be embedded in your presentation. Embed Fonts in PowerPoint 2019/Office 365 for Mac. Up until early 2020, Microsoft Office hadn’t provided the feature for embedding fonts in PowerPoint for Mac. Now you can, as long as you’re an Office 365 subscriber or are using PowerPoint 2019 v16.17 or later.
Office 365: the sky’s the limit (heh). This is the only version that allows you to select from all cloud fonts and use them to build font themes, templates, and new presentation content. You can embed fonts for other versions.
Office 2019: if someone shares a file that uses cloud fonts, you will be able to view and edit the presentation.
Office 2010, 2013, 2016 for Windows: cloud fonts are not recognized unless they are embedded. The good news is that all cloud fonts are fully embeddable, unlike many fonts purchased from foundries.*
When in doubt, embed cloud fonts. Embedding works well from most recent desktop versions of PowerPoint, including Office 365 and 2019 for Windows and Mac. You can embed cloud fonts for use with older versions of Office for Windows (2010, 2013, 2016) but note that older versions of Office for Mac (2008, 2011) will not recognize embedded fonts.
I’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to help you wade through the list of available cloud fonts. The guide includes an alphabetized index of modern Latin alphabet fonts, a section on symbol fonts, and a list of non-Latin, language-specific fonts and the languages each supports. Some pages are flagged with “new” which indicates the most recent additions to Office fonts. Template designers and builders: the guide includes a legend to help you make decisions for theme body fonts. A green circle indicates that font is well suited for presentation body text. The gold square designates fonts that are okay choices for body text, but there are caveats indicated on each page. Some of these fonts have very thin strokes which may reduce legibility at small sizes. Others include non-lining figures, which means that some of the numerals extend above or below other characters. These characters are not well suited for chart labels or table figures. Other fonts deemed as okay choices may be missing italic or bold styles, which results in machine-bold or slanted text when font styles are applied in PowerPoint. The third legend symbol is a grey outlined circle which indicates those good ole safe fonts, those that are present with most older versions of Office and do not require embedding.
![Embed fonts powerpoint for mac Embed fonts powerpoint for mac](/uploads/1/1/8/9/118958591/313076639.jpg)
Let me know if you’ve found the guide helpful. If sharing with others, please credit Julie Terberg. Thanks. For more information, refer to this article from Microsoft: Cloud fonts in Office
*A few notes regarding custom fonts and embedding: you can choose other fonts, beyond those on the cloud fonts list, for a template or presentation. Be careful doing so, as many fonts cannot be embedded at all. The font foundry or font creator can assign different levels of embeddability and those assigned as non-embeddable or preview/print will not embed in PowerPoint. You can see the font embeddability setting in the Windows Fonts folder. Fonts that are set to editable or installable will embed; this includes both TTF and OTF files. If you choose to embed fonts in your templates and files, test thoroughly on various systems and devices before distribution. Inform everyone who will use the files about the custom fonts and show them how to save their files with embedded fonts. Choose the option to embed all characters to enable full editability. Also note that embedding fonts will increase file size.
Original article and guide published April 2019.
Nov 2019 updates: 14 new typeface families with a total of 85 fonts added.
Many Mac® users consider the fonts on Mac to be more elegant than the fonts on Windows, and therefore they want to use their Mac fonts in their PowerPoint presentations. Figure 1, however, shows what can happen when you send those presentations to Windows users, or use a Windows PC to drive the projector in your presentation. It is not pretty.
Technology to the Rescue: Font Embedding
Normally, fonts are installed in the OS—either macOS® or Windows—and applications access the fonts installed in the OS they’re running on. Minecraft morph mod 1.16.1. Font embedding is the technology of actually adding fonts into the document you’re working with. When you do this (and assuming that the application supports embedded fonts) your document will look as you intended, regardless of where you view it.
Microsoft Office for Windows applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) have supported font embedding for some time. As of February 2018, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac added support for embedded fonts. (Notice that I said “support for embedded fonts,” not “support for embedding fonts.” There is a difference, as explained later in this post.)
Using this new capability in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, Figure 2 shows what the not-very-pretty presentation from Figure 1 looks like after properly embedding the Mac fonts that are not available in Windows.
Figure 2_With font embedding — perfect results
Two Approaches to Font Embedding
Before I show you how to embed fonts, I need to explain about the two approaches to font embedding, and the pros and cons of each approach.
Figure 3 shows the two basic approaches to font embedding:
1) embedding the actual font file (or a portion of it) in the document, and
2) embedding the outlines of each character used in the document.
There are pros and cons to each approach:
Embed the Font File | Embed the Outlines of Characters Used | ||
Pros | Cons | Pros | Cons |
Text can be edited | Can significantly increase the file size of the document | Works for all fonts | Text cannot be edited |
Some fonts are tagged “Not embeddable” by the font creator | Works in all document types | Does not work in some OSes | |
Does not work with some older font types | Works in most applications | ||
Works with all font types |
How to Embed in PowerPoint
PowerPoint for Mac
While the latest version of PowerPoint 2016 for Mac supports embedded fonts if they’re present, it does not have the ability to actually embed fonts. For this, you must use a third-party utility. The one that I’ve used successfully is Presentation Font Embedder (available in the Mac App Store, or as a direct purchase). It’s simple to use (Figure 4) but slightly expensive ($27.49 USD) compared to other single-purpose utilities.
Figure 4_Presentation Font Embedder
PowerPoint for Windows
PowerPoint for Windows has the ability to embed fonts, so no third-party utility is generally needed. From the “Save As” dialog (Figure 5), click on the “Tools” menu and choose “Save Options…”
In that Options dialog (Figure 6), choose “Embed fonts” in the file preference.
Figure 6_The WinPowerPoint Save options
A Possible Complication
The creator of a font can mark it as non-embeddable. For such a font, you must use the outline method shown in Figure 3.
In Windows 10, it’s easy to determine if a font is embeddable, since the Font window contains a column showing the embeddability. (See Figure 7.) If the Font Embeddability column shows anything other than “Editable,” the font probably can’t be embedded.
Figure 7_In windows 10, you can easily see if a font is embeddable
On the Mac, the only way I’ve found to determine if a font is embeddable is to try and embed it; if you get an error message (Figure 8), then that font is not embeddable.
Figure 8_Error message when a font is not embeddable
Text to Outline – Add-in for Mac and Windows
How To Embed Fonts In Powerpoint
For years now, whenever I wanted to use a special font in a PPT presentation – and wanted to make sure that everyone would be able to see the text in this font correctly – I used a free WinPowerPoint add-in, Text to Outline. I would move my presentation to Windows, open it up in WinPowerPoint, use this add-in, and then move the presentation back to Mac.
The developers of this add-in have recently ported it to Mac so that it works in MacPowerPoint 2016. You can get it here.
Here is what your MacPowerPoint ribbon will look like after installing this add-in:
For further details on font embedding, see the following:
Embed Fonts Powerpoint For Mac
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