EMBEDDING FONTS IN MICROSOFT WORD/POWER POINT

By Selin George [www.selin.in], Monday, June 2, 2008.

Have you ever fussed, Microsoft word documents typed in regional languages such as Tamil, Hindi, etc. in one computer shows a weird font like ”Gdpj ghj;jpkh md;id Mya Myak; fy;Yf;$l;lk;” in other computer. A wonderful power point presentation sent by your friend looks clumsy when you open in your computer. Read more to discover the reason behind this strange behaviour and a way of preventing this by embedding fonts.

Technical reasons behind this problem: If the font used to prepare a document in one computer is not available in other computer, the operating system tries to substitute an equivalent font while opening such documents. In the absence of an equivalent font, OS prints the system font character equivalent to the Unicode character. Here I used a Tamil font (Bamini) to demonstrate this.

Bamini font symbol table and Tamil first letter (pronounced as ahh):

The Unicode mapped for is U+006D and is same as the Unicode character for English lowercase alphabet ”m” [Refer Wikipedia]. Hence, in the absence of Bamini font, Operating System (OS) substitutes the character ”m” to display . Thus you see a sequence of weird symbols in place of the actual font.

This problem can be resolved by embedding the font while saving Microsoft office documents.

Embedding fonts in Microsoft Word 2007:

Tick ”Embed fonts in this file” in Microsoft Word options as given below.

Press OK for the new configuration to be active. Now you can save the document and send it to anyone in the world. They can view the contents without downloading the fonts.

Use the same procedure to embed font in Microsoft Power Point 2007.