Powerpoint 2011 font issues!

Question

Hello,

I am using a mac os x 10.8, and powerpoint 2011 14.1. 

I laid out a presentation for a client, using the company's font Neutra (sans) They use PC's and have the Neutra font family on their computers. 

When i sent the presentation to this client, most of the weights of nuetra were not loading. It seems as though they have all neutra fonts, but only two of the weights are loading in their powerpoint. 

Any idea how to make sure when i send over a presentation, the fonts will always be installed?

Help! thanks!

Answer 1

This is an example of why it's a really good idea to design in the same version your client is using, by means or Bootcamp or Parallels. As Steve has mentioned, font families work differently under OS X and Windows. OS X will happily gather a group of fonts and make one big family from it, but in Windows, the family must be constructed by the foundry and always has a maximum of 4 members.

The best idea is to visit your client and find out which Neutra weights are in their most used font family. This will probably be the Roman, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic, but you should check. Then on your Mac uninstall all the other weights. Set the base font in the font theme (here's my article that tells you how: XML Hacking: Font Themes). When you're creating the presentation, set the font dropdown to the theme font and leave it. The font dropdown will read Neutra (Headings) or Neutra (Body) when it's set to the theme font. Then access the other weights by using only the Bold and Italic buttons in PowerPoint. This will work 95% of the time, but you still need to test before final delivery.

BTW, your version of PowerPoint should be up to 14.6.3. Please use Help>Check for Updates to get the most recent version.

Answer 2

It's been a while since I had to deal with this but at one time, Windows was restricted to four weights of a given font:  Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic.  Other weights of the font would appear as different fonts altogether (XXX-Light, for example).  There's no way for you to choose XXX as the font and apply a Light weight.

MacOS didn't have that restriction, IIRC, so if the font XXX had a Light weight available, you could choose it.  And there was the problem:  From the Mac side, XXX in Light weight made sense.  From the PC side, it didn't compute so some other weight of XXX would be substituted.