The design of letters and characters is called a font, and a font can be stored in a file for digital use. In this text, we call these files just fonts.
When you buy a computer (whether PC or Mac), it comes with a large number of fonts pre-installed with Windows and Mac OS. This allows you to use a variety of fonts without ever having to connect to the internet. Microsoft Office is a widely used software that includes many fonts.
Some fonts, such as Helvetica, are available with Mac OS but not with Windows or Microsoft Office. This means that they are not automatically available to most PC users. For this reason, they are said not to be standard fonts.
If you have Microsoft Office365, you subscribe to Microsoft Office and pay monthly or annually. You can also buy Microsoft Office without a subscription and that version is called Office 2019 (currently). With Office 365, you not only get all the latest Office apps, but also a library of over 500 so-called cloud fonts. Cloud fonts are fonts that reside in the cloud. This means you can use them via the Office suite or the Online Office suite, as well as on PC, Mac or mobile devices.
These fonts are not installed. They are automatically "activated" when used in a document. If you send a document or presentation to someone who doesn't have an Office 365 subscription, one of two things can happen. Either they have Office 2019 and can see the correct font and edit the document with that font. Or they have an older version of Office. In that case, a fallback font available in the Office version will be displayed instead.
Cloud font files are not stored under C:\Windows\Fonts
instead, Microsoft Cloud fonts are stored here:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\FontCache\4\CloudFonts
and Adobe Cloud fonts here:
%APPDATA%\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype
For more information, including a list of cloud fonts, visit Microsoft Cloud fonts
A specialty font is a font that, for various reasons, is not available in Office. If you want to use such a font and you cannot install it through Windows, Mac OS or Office, there are several ways to do so:
For example, Google offers a large number of free fonts that can be downloaded and used for free.
Adobe also offers fonts, via the Adobe Creative Cloud. If you subscribe to the service, you have access to their font library. There you can choose fonts to activate, or purchase and install.
In addition, there are thousands of independent font designers who allow the purchase of specialty fonts on their websites. Many of these designers can be hired to design a unique font just for you or your business.
Even if you have a specialized font installed, you can never be sure that your recipient has it. In most applications, font files are not included in documents or presentations - they are simply referenced. This means that the computer will be told to use a particular font, but if the font is not available, it won't work. In most cases, the user will not receive an error message. The font selector may still display the name of the custom font, but the font that actually appears in the document/presentation will be a standard font that is available, often Calibri or Arial.
Some software, such as Adobe Acrobat, often automatically includes custom fonts. Other software, such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Word, allows you to embed fonts in a file to ensure that the correct font is displayed to a recipient without the font being installed. Some programs, such as Microsoft Excel, do not allow you to embed fonts at all.
There are several different font licenses; commercial, web and desktop licenses. When it comes to licenses, a few restrictions apply. If you right-click on a font file and navigate to Properties, you can see which of the license properties listed below this particular font has. We recommend that you purchase a commercial, installable, or editable license for desktop fonts to ensure ease of use and flexibility.
Installable
Fonts with this setting indicate that they may be embedded and permanently installed on the remote system by an application.
Editable
Fonts that are editable can be embedded in documents, but are only temporarily installed to view or edit the document.
Preview and Print
Fonts with the Preview and Print license can be embedded in documents for display purposes only.
Restricted
Restricted fonts cannot be embedded in documents.
TTF
TTF is the abbreviation for True Type Fonts. True type fonts have been around since the 1980s. They work well in Microsoft Office applications, but are large in file size. There is also a Mac-specific version of TTF that cannot be used on PC - so it is important to make sure that the TTF font you choose is a Windows TTF font, as it will then work on both PC and Mac OS.
OTF
OTF stands for OpenType Fonts. Open Type Fonts originated in the 1990s and are widely used on both PC and Macintosh computers. They often have smaller file sizes and can be more complex with greater support for other languages.
Although TrueType fonts have been the preferred standard in Microsoft applications in the past, Open Type fonts now work equally well, and due to their flexibility and reduced file size are now the preferred option in Microsoft Office.
WOFF
WOFF or Web Open Font Format is a font for use on the Web. They work much like compressed Open or True Type Font files, ensuring the speed of rendering of a website. WOFF cannot be used in Microsoft applications such as Word and PowerPoint.
It is important that the desktop font license allows embedding of the font. If it does, the easiest option is to save the document or presentation as a PDF.
File > Save as > PDF.
There are then a few techniques to ensure that the font has been embedded in the PDF:
1. Open the PDF file and compare it with the original document.
2. Send it to a recipient who does not have the font installed along with a screenshot of the original document.
3. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and choose Optimize PDF > Advanced Optimization. From the advanced menu you can see which fonts are embedded in the PDF. You can also choose to remove embedded fonts in the event that default fonts or unwanted fonts have been accidentally embedded in the PDF.
4. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and review the properties menu. From there you can see which fonts have been embedded. This menu does not allow you to remove unwanted or default fonts that may have been embedded.
If you want to embed the font in a document/presentation, you can do so via the menu
File > Options > Save > (Embed fonts in file).
Custom fonts cannot be embedded in Excel workbooks.
Due to conflicts in certain transfer protocols (how files are moved), specifically between Mac and PC operating systems, fonts may appear corrupt when copied or moved. If the font file types work on both PC and Mac, the best way to transfer is to zip the font files when copying or moving them.
It is worth noting that Mac TrueType fonts only work on Mac operating systems and cannot be installed on PCs. However, Windows True Type fonts work on both Mac and Windows. PostScript fonts work on the Mac but Windows operating systems may require additional software to enable storage of the fonts.
The result of transferring a PostScript or Mac True Type font to Windows is often a font that does not open, with a file size of 0 kb. This is because Windows lacks the ability to store this type of data, and instead never transfers anything even though it may appear to do so by displaying the file and file name as transferred.
We sometimes use the term spare/fallback fonts. What we mean is this:
An example of when fallback fonts are relevant is when Office tries to render a font that is not available. The software automatically replaces the missing font with one that is available.
Often Arial, Calibri or Verdana is used as a replacement. This can have a big impact on your document. For example, if the letters or characters in the replacement font are slightly wider than your original font, your document may double in size. PowerPoint, which unlike Word does not flow text from one page to another but instead often increases the size of the text placeholder, can cause text to overflow onto the page and not show up in a presentation. Our recommendation is to choose a fallback font that has the same properties as your primary font. If the fonts are similar in size and design, you minimise the problems when switching between them.
Another time fallback fonts come into play is when a custom font has been chosen to communicate your brand, and a fallback font is selected in the event that the custom font cannot be used. When working with branding in different formats, you will quickly discover the limitations that fonts can have. For this reason, it is always a good idea to list a second default font that is widely available in your brand identity.
Letters or characters used in font files usually have different widths. The width of the letter I does not have to be the same as the width of the letter W. These different widths can create the illusion that your text is not evenly aligned. This becomes clear, for example, when you create a fillable form where the user has to type each letter of their name in individual boxes: it will be impossible to achieve evenly spaced text with variable-width fonts.
Fixed-width fonts mean that each letter/digit/character has the same width, which is useful in forms and for number arrays so that 1s, 10s, 100s, etc. line up above each other.
Aptos mono and Lucida Sans are two examples of standard monospace fonts.
If the font in your document/presentation does not allow embedding or if there are problems with embedding, the result is often that it is not embedded at all and instead the font is converted to images. This is due to a default setting in the save options in Microsoft Office called "Bitmap text when fonts may not be embedded". If this option is checked, the text will be converted to images.The images are often of poor quality, become pixelated and sometimes difficult to read.
You can disable text bitmapping via:
File > Save as > PDF > Options and then uncheck "Bitmap text when fonts are not embedded".
This effect is called faux bold and is often undesirable. The thickness or "weight" of a font is often indicated in its name: Arial Regular, Arial Bold or Arial Black. Unfortunately, settings made in Microsoft Office can sometimes confuse Adobe Acrobat. If you use a Black font (Black means it is the thickest version of the font and not its color) in Office, and then make it bold via the Bold button, your text will remain unchanged. This is because Microsoft Office understands that the font is already bolded. But then, in the export to PDF, this information can be lost. As a result, Adobe Acrobat will take in information about the text, the font and the bold information, but not the bold version of the font itself. Adobe Acrobat therefore adds an additional outline around each letter to produce a bolder version of the font, and this is called faux bold.
To remove the faux bold, you must either install the bold version of the font so that it is embedded and Adobe gets the correct instructions on how to display it, or uncheck the bold feature in Office and save the PDF file again.
When you create a presentation, you use text, objects and images. While everything is presented visually via PowerPoint, most of the file you've created is saved in various code snippets. If you were to create a particular shape, customize it, and then delete it, some of the code that was used to store that creation may remain. In most cases this is to help you, but when it comes to fonts this can create a problem called "phantom fonts". When you use specialty fonts in some versions of PowerPoint, and then change to a standard font, references to the specialty font may remain in the code behind. If you were to then send the presentation to a user who does not have the specialty font (which no longer appears in the presentation) installed, they may receive an error message. The error message usually says that the presentation requires that font. Although this does not prevent anyone from opening the presentation, it is not good to get error messages when opening a file.
In PowerPoint, you can navigate to Home > Replace > Replace Font and try to find the incorrect font and replace it with a default font. In the event that this doesn't work, the code sections need to be cleaned of the font, which is a bit more complicated.
As PDF files: Yes! As editable Office documents: Unfortunately not. With an Office365 subscription, you can use Cloud Fonts which gives you more than 500 fonts to choose from. Cloud fonts are rendered correctly via the mobile version of Word and PowerPoint. For more information on cloud fonts see above.
A photo or image in .jpg or .png format is called a raster image. A raster image simply means that it consists of colored pixels (dots or squares). When such an image is enlarged, the pixels are also enlarged and the result can be perceived as poor quality. It is always a good rule of thumb to refrain from using text in .jpg or .png files to ensure that the text is readable.
Images such as logos or figures containing text can be saved as vector images instead. Some examples of vector file formats are SVG, EMF, WMF and EPS. Vector image files contain no pixels, instead they contain code sections with coordinates almost like instructions. When a vector image is enlarged, the distance between the coordinates increases and the result should always be sharp. However, if text is used in a vector image before the text is converted to objects/lines, problems arise. If the vector image is inserted into PowerPoint, for example, the text in the image is read as text in a font - and if the font in question is not installed, PowerPoint, as mentioned earlier, switches to a fallback font. To prevent your text in vectorized images and objects from changing fonts, you need to prepare it in Illustrator to become paths. This will result in the code rendering the text as an object/shape rather than text.
Variable fonts, also known as OpenType variable fonts, are generally great. Instead of just bolding text, you can customize the weight and width of the font - to make it look just the way you want.
Unfortunately, at the moment these changes cannot be saved to PDFs. They work fine in Office, but when you save, export or print your material as a PDF, the customizations stop working.
We advise against the use of variable fonts until Microsoft and Adobe solve the problem.
Specialty fonts can be perceived differently depending on whether they are used on a PC or a Mac. This is because the two systems use different technologies to render text. Macs use Quartz, which often provides sharper and more detailed rendering, while Windows uses ClearType, which is optimized to make text easy to read on PC screens. The differences are similar to how color rendering varies between systems, with Mac generally being more accurate. These subtle variations affect how text and design appear on each platform.
